From the Only Survivor of Crypto Social to "Wallet-First": Farcaster’s Misunderstood Shift

Original Title: "Social Walletization, Wallet Socialization"

Original Author: 0xLuo, Senior Farcaster Player

Recently, a post by Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero stating that Farcaster's current focus has shifted from "social-first" to "wallet-first" has attracted widespread attention and discussion. For active Farcaster users, it should already be apparent that since the Farcaster App introduced its built-in wallet feature in February, it has supported more and more chains and increasingly rich features. This statement is nothing new and can be seen as a summary of the team's direction this year. However, for those unfamiliar with Farcaster, this announcement may seem surprising, leading many to lament that the "only hope for crypto social," the "last hope of SocialFi," has "announced failure," "abandoned social," or "betrayed its original intention." Some are disappointed that the "social track has been disproved," that "Web3 social is unworkable," and worry that the community atmosphere is sliding toward "casino-ization," with the team "rushing in the wrong direction."

The reason for this divergence lies in different understandings of the Farcaster wallet's positioning. In fact, the built-in wallet added to the Farcaster App this year is not an abrupt strategic shift, but a natural upgrade to the previous experience where users had to connect external wallets to perform on-chain operations. As Frames have gradually evolved into more feature-rich and interactive Mini Apps, users' demand for seamless on-chain interaction has also increased. The emergence of the built-in wallet is essentially to accommodate new scenarios, supplementing basic capabilities on top of the social network, not abandoning the existing social network.

The wallet is an addition, not a replacement; it drives social, not invades social; it expands social, not abandons social; it is a natural progression, not a forced transformation.

The original open social protocol foundation remains as always, with a diverse client ecosystem still thriving. By switching clients, you can still experience pure social features. The official Farcaster App still retains its original social functions; it just added a built-in wallet this year, expanding on existing features, seamlessly connecting with Mini Apps, deeply integrating with the identity graph, and smoothly interacting with the social information flow.

The team is merely adjusting the product-side focus, trying to find new paths for network growth. They no longer spend time onboarding users from various industries for the sake of network diversity, nor do they spend time optimizing the low-impact Channels community feature. They have spent enough time building a small but beautiful "comfortable corner," but the "social-first" strategy has not achieved sufficient PMF, and tens of thousands of daily active users are still very niche. Thus, they pragmatically return to the first principles of crypto applications: serving value flow.

On this basis, the combination of wallet and social is a stronger product differentiator, a more realistic growth path, and closer to the PMF Schelling point of crypto social. In fact, this shift in Farcaster's focus this year is also a footnote to the development direction of crypto social applications: "Social walletization, wallet socialization" is the natural convergence direction for consumer-grade crypto applications. Now, almost all products with a social element have wallet functions, and wallet applications are also trying to add social elements. Not to mention, many applications have been natively positioned as social + wallet from the start.

Social Applications Becoming Wallets

To stand out, all crypto applications must answer how they differ from traditional off-chain counterparts, and of course, crypto social applications must answer how they differ from traditional social products. Product manager Yu Jun once proposed a famous formula to measure whether a new product is attractive enough to users:

Product Value = (New Experience − Old Experience) − Migration Cost

Some new products have very low migration costs. Threads, backed by Instagram's social graph, was able to surpass 100 million users in five days. The luckiest are those who encounter users migrating just for the sake of migration; Bluesky, for example, capitalized on the "uncensored Twitter" angle and caught the rare wave of Twitter refugees.

But most crypto applications lack such backing and luck. To get users to even glance at their product instead of more mature, larger traditional social products, they can only focus on enhancing the new experience. Crypto social started from a technical perspective, integrating with blockchain at the base layer to achieve decentralization. However, embedding crypto technology at the base layer is imperceptible to most users and does not bring a new experience, lacking differentiation when competing with traditional social products, and may even complicate the onboarding process. For example, both Farcaster and Lens use blockchain at their core: Farcaster stores identity data on the OP chain, Lens stores identity and social graphs on the Lens Chain, ensuring "not your private key, not your social account." But most users don't care about underlying technology; they care about what new experiences the product offers.

The Farcaster team realized this early on. Their philosophy is "product leads protocol development," hoping to drive the entire Farcaster network's growth through a flagship product. If they only wanted to build a social protocol, their task would be basically complete—they've implemented many theories of decentralized social, creating a "fully decentralized" protocol from the start, emphasizing openness, programmability, and composability, allowing developers to build various applications on the open social graph. But if, like Nostr, ActivityPub, or Lens, they let the ecosystem develop freely, users won't migrate just because your underlying technology is different. The content noise from unchecked ecosystem growth further reduces user experience, and the result is often that users don't want to come, and those who do can't be retained. The Farcaster team built their own client to attract users at the product level.

High-quality social circles are a new experience, unique alpha information is a new experience, and the combination of crypto and social is a new experience. Farcaster initially achieved the first point by onboarding a group of high-quality users, which is a rare moat, but growth is limited and it's hard to attract the majority of "profit-driven, freeloading" crypto users. Interestingly, Farcaster was once criticized for being too "clean"; for a long time, discussing token price movements on Farcaster was taboo and could only be done in the /DEGEN Channel's corner—highbrow content naturally attracts few. So it wasn't until early 2024, when Frames—a crypto-native feature different from traditional social apps—was launched, and the community grew the $DEGEN creator economy project, that Farcaster's daily active users began to grow significantly, increasing more than tenfold from around 2,000 at the end of January 2024. This was due to product innovation and the high-quality community's ability to incubate projects on this open social network.

Farcaster's early version of a mini program, a trading Frame

At that time, Farcaster had already transitioned from the "agricultural era" of pure social networking to the "handicraft era" of initial crypto integration: social graph + Frames + external wallet, connecting social content flow and on-chain operations for the first time. Later, Solana also tried to use the Actions protocol with a browser extension to enable wallet and crypto mini-app interaction within the Twitter feed—social media × crypto apps × wallet interaction is a direction everyone wants to explore. With Frames, users could mint NFTs and execute trades within the social feed—a new experience, but limited to four action buttons, with transitions like PowerPoint slides, and both functionality and performance were limited. Any wallet authorization required jumping to an external wallet, resulting in limited features and a fragmented experience. From the first day Frames launched, the community called for a full wallet feature, but it actually took a year to arrive.

In the Farcaster Chinese community WeChat group, users were already excitedly imagining wallet features when Frames launched in early 2024

Later last year, with the arrival of the memecoin supercycle, from the popularity of PumpFun to the homegrown Farcaster project Clanker, more asset issuance led to more trading needs, and the importance of the entire path from discovery to trading became increasingly prominent, making the wallet a more and more critical entry point in this process.

So it's easy to understand that to allow users to interact more naturally with crypto apps within a social media platform, you need:

1. A more flexible and higher-performance underlying framework to support more powerful mini-apps

2. Transition from connecting external wallets to using a built-in wallet for truly seamless on-chain interaction

This has also been validated on instant messaging social apps like Telegram, whose Mini Apps ecosystem and built-in TON wallet have already sparked a craze. So this year, Farcaster naturally completed its upgrade:

1. Frames → Mini Apps

2. External wallet → Built-in wallet

Whatever can be achieved on the web can be achieved with Mini Apps. Anyone can build without permission, and they are cross-client compatible, greatly expanding the functional boundaries within social media apps. Interacting with the built-in wallet no longer requires jumping to an external wallet, thus moving from the "handicraft era" of basic crypto features to the richer "industrial era." This is not a deviation, but a natural extension along the trend—not a forced pivot, but an inevitable evolution in response to market demand.

Integrating a built-in wallet is not the death knell of crypto social media, but its industrial revolution.

Crypto Apps and Decentralized Social by Linda Xie

With a built-in wallet, there are naturally trading signals based on the social graph. Asset issuance, dissemination, discovery, trading, and community building can all be completed in a closed loop within the same app, and can easily interact with Mini Apps to realize almost all crypto app functions, including games, video, live streaming, voice Spaces, podcasts, prediction markets, DeFi, and more. A rich Mini Apps ecosystem and the built-in wallet work in tandem, integrating on-chain interaction into users' daily social behavior. Apps like Noice, Bracky, QR, and Harmonybot have all created new crypto social interaction scenarios thanks to the social graph + Mini Apps + built-in wallet, each having their own highlight moments, and Farcaster's daily active users hit a new high at the end of October under this backdrop.

Trending Mini Apps of Different Categories

These are experiences that users can perceive, use, and unlock entirely new scenarios—true differentiators from traditional social products. Even if users initially only use the wallet for more convenient access, lower fees, and seamless cross-chain experience, there is still a chance to "come for the tool, stay for the network." This is a step forward compared to the past, when social networks alone struggled to compete for attention with Twitter.

Coincidentally, some instant messaging apps are also proactively adding wallet features on top of social. For example, Farcaster ecosystem chat app frens and DeBox both allow users to directly call the built-in wallet for trading by posting a CA in a chat group. More and more developers are realizing: mainstream crypto users should not be avoided. The feature of crypto social is not to stay away from wallets, but to embrace them; the value layer should not be separated, but integrated. Crypto social without a built-in wallet is what has "taken a detour."

frens screenshots

Wallet Applications Becoming Social

Similarly, crypto wallet applications are also trying to integrate social elements. From being mere asset containers and trading gateways, as user needs and on-chain behaviors diversify, they also want to add social signals and interactions based on the social graph.

Zapper and Base App were originally wallet applications, but now both have integrated Farcaster social protocol content and social graphs, effectively becoming Farcaster protocol clients. This also demonstrates the value of Farcaster as an open, programmable, and composable social protocol. The protocol is open, interfaces are clear, and developers are free to build a client or app based on Farcaster. Whether it's a wallet or another app, anyone can integrate Farcaster's social layer into their product without permission.

Zapper adds Farcaster network content and on-chain activity and trading signals based on the Farcaster social graph on top of its wallet, allowing users to discover trading opportunities from the on-chain behavior of followed users and quickly complete trades with one click.

Base App, on the other hand, has integrated Farcaster as a social feed, Zora as a tool for creators to assetize content, and XMTP as the underlying protocol for instant messaging and community chat, on top of its original wallet. Thus, Base App enables content creation, asset issuance, social discovery, token trading, app interaction, community chat, and interaction with agents, forming a closed loop of content, relationships, and value in the same space.

Zerion has also integrated the social graph for social discovery, building on its already robust wallet address following feature by incorporating Twitter, Farcaster, and Lens social identities, making it easier to discover interesting users and top traders' trading signals.

Zapper, Base App, Zerion

Centralized exchanges can also be considered wallets and are actively exploring social integration. Binance launched Binance Feed in 2022, upgraded to Binance Square in 2023, and has built a comprehensive community platform focused on trading, leveraging the world's largest crypto trading traffic gateway. Users can follow traders, access in-depth content, and exchange strategies within the same app, with diverse social features like voice and live streaming, encouraging users to spend more time on the platform.

Similarly, Robinhood, a centralized trading platform now involved in crypto and prediction markets, recently announced it is exploring social features, allowing users to share strategies, discover signals, and copy trades on the platform.

However, social features built by centralized exchanges are often closed ecosystems. Like traditional social platforms, users' relationships, content, and identities remain under the platform's control. Unfortunately, ordinary developers cannot freely build new apps based on their social graph; all features rely on the exchange team's iteration. But as always, users don't care about this—they only care if your product is useful and easy to use.

Robinhood is exploring social

For wallets, social is not a decorative feature, but a key step in upgrading from "tool" to "network." Social gives asset behavior context, provides sources for trading decisions, and creates a trajectory for content distribution. By adding social, wallets can better achieve network effects, evolving from tools to ecosystems.

Social + Wallet: Trading, Discovery, Creation

Social apps are becoming wallets, wallet apps are becoming social, and the two are increasingly intertwined and converging—this is actually the natural convergence direction for consumer-grade crypto applications. For crypto social, not proactively integrating with wallets is a passive choice that alienates mainstream crypto users. Not doing so means falling behind and being replaced by more complete product forms. Social apps need wallets to complete the puzzle of on-chain interaction. The core capabilities that constitute the differentiated experience of crypto social—crypto app ecosystems, creator economies—must rely on comprehensive wallet functions. Stacking the value layer on the social layer provides a growth lever for social networks.

For wallets, adding social is the icing on the cake. Users no longer "leave after using," but stay for relationships, content, and community. Wallets evolve from tools to networks, from entry points to scenarios, from asset managers to interactive spaces, naturally expanding more application scenarios and network effects.

Of course, some applications have targeted the "social + wallet" route from the start, realizing early on that the two are naturally complementary and can form a value closed loop of content, relationships, and assets.

· interface.social: Supports discovering popular tokens, tracking users' on-chain activities, copy trading, and allows users to post trading opinions (Takes).

· 0xppl.com: Supports discovering popular tokens, multi-chain wallet behavior tracking, copy trading, and profit monitoring.

· Firefly.social: Firefly is an aggregator client for multiple social networks, including X, Farcaster, Lens, and Bluesky. It supports cross-platform one-click posting and digs for trading opportunities in social data by aggregating friends' trading activities.

· fomo.family: Supports real-time tracking of friends' and top traders' on-chain trades, and quickly discovers new assets through built-in trading analysis and profit/loss tracking.

· Share.xyz: Allows users to share any trade, follow any wallet, receive real-time trade notifications, and supports copy trading with profit sharing for those being copied.

· gmgn.ai: Supports quickly discovering popular assets, tracking smart money and followed users' holdings and trades, executing second-level on-chain trades, and provides integrated on-chain intelligence and trading tools with auto-copy, risk control checks, and real-time alerts.

· Vector.fun: Supports on-chain user trading activity and asset discovery. Acquired by Coinbase and currently suspended.

Interface, 0xppl, fomo, Share

From start to finish, you'll notice that many of their features and interfaces are similar. "Trading, Discovery, Creation" is Farcaster's new slogan, and it fits other "social + wallet" apps as well—basically all about discovering trading signals, quickly copy trading, and sharing trading strategies.

The difference may lie in each product's chosen focus. Different apps make different trade-offs in features, with varying emphasis and depth. Some emphasize content production, allowing users to explain "what to buy and why"; others focus almost entirely on trade execution, data insights, and copy trading efficiency. These choices ultimately shape different product strengths and user experiences.

Who will stand out? It may depend on who can do one thing professionally and deeply enough.

For example, 0xPPL is becoming increasingly professional in on-chain graph analysis, and with many connected social graphs, it has become a tool for quickly identifying on-chain address identities, which is useful during new token launches. GMGN has made the trading process—from discovery to analysis to execution—the most efficient. In terms of multi-chain support, Zapper and Zerion, as professional wallets, cover a wide range of chains. For actual cross-chain experience, Farcaster Wallet is very smooth with minimal friction.

Interface, fomo, and Share's "Takes," "Comment," or "Share" are differentiators, allowing users to write their own trading logic and hoping to accumulate content creation within their apps, but centralized content has less network effect. Of course, other apps can directly integrate the Farcaster protocol for content creation, allowing produced content to spread across a larger social network.

Additionally, apps based on the Farcaster protocol have another advantage: they can reuse hundreds or thousands of existing Farcaster Mini Apps with diverse functions, embedding mini-programs directly into the social flow and easily expanding internal app functionality without reinventing the wheel.

"Social + Wallet" Crypto Application Panorama

Dan Romero once said, "It's much easier to add a wallet to a social network than to add a social network to a wallet." Expanding wallet capabilities on an existing social network may be easier from a product perspective for Farcaster. However, other apps can also directly integrate existing social networks, unless they are very confident in their own user base.

From the "social + wallet" crypto application panorama, it's clear that if you want to build a "social + wallet" app, Farcaster and X are the most commonly chosen social graphs. The difference is that, due to different levels of openness, integrating the X social graph often just links wallet addresses with X accounts; but when integrating the Farcaster social graph, in addition to linking identities, you can easily import users' existing social relationships and even content produced on the social network, instantly gaining a ready-made social network instead of rebuilding social content and relationship graphs from scratch.

As more and more apps adopt Farcaster as social infrastructure, the value of the entire network will be amplified in reverse, enhancing the protocol's network effects. Looking back over the past four years, the Farcaster team has built a "small but refined" social graph with a restrained development path. Although growth has been limited, the accumulated social relationships, content, and culture are becoming the underlying assets and infrastructure of the open crypto social ecosystem. In the future, this network will continue to be enriched, extended, and adopted.

Conclusion

Farcaster is not dead, crypto social is not dead, and Farcaster as crypto social is not dead. True crypto social is not just about building a social network, but about combining social with value flow. So this year, the Farcaster App's leap from inconvenient external wallet connections to a fully functional built-in wallet is a key step in adding a long-overdue foundational capability. This is not abandoning social, but driving social, giving social a new growth engine.

The recent "mockery" Farcaster has faced precisely shows that its social graph is still too small and daily active users are still too limited, creating an information gap and misinterpretation among outsiders. At the same time, in the trend of "social walletization, wallet socialization," Farcaster App still faces ongoing competition—these are the current real challenges. It needs to continue relying on the dual engines of "wallet-first" product strategy and the ever-emerging Mini Apps in the ecosystem to drive growth, with product-side value flow capabilities continuing to complement the protocol-side composable ecosystem capabilities.

What will happen next? No one can guarantee the answer. But perhaps, by expanding wallet functionality on existing social media, crypto social is just beginning—let value flow, and crypto social networks will become more vibrant.

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