New users come to Farcaster for two reasons: a) they find Warpcast a great social product and see their friends there and b) because of products built on the Farcaster protocol they want to use (like clanker, or super).
The main driver for (a) is the good work of Dan, Varun and the Merkle factory team. Not much to say here besides noting their remarkable execution and prompt recovery from actions that arguably adversely impacted (b).
(b) is the more interesting factor because it's the driver for Farcaster's long-term growth and a flywheel. Adoption looks like this:
devs come to build new experiences that can only exist on an open social graph →some of these experiments (like degen, supercast, clanker) work out and attract people beyond the Farcaster ecosystem → Farcaster becomes more attractive for more devs to come
The critical assumption is that devs want to build on Farcaster. An encouraging anecdotal data point is that in the past 12 months I've met hundreds of teams building full time in the ecosystem, without a sliver of inorganic financial incentives. I emphasise inorganic, because founders are economically motivated. They want to build on Farcaster because their products can become great businesses and generate organic revenue.
Developers and founders come because a) they can build products that can't exist anywhere else or b) because they can tap into a growing, high-quality user base. Farcaster users are eager to try new products and willing to spend more than typical X or Threads users (great potential Average Revenue per User). They can make a killing by building net new things and tapping into this great distribution channel.
And that's how Farcaster wins: by being a flourishing economy. Where good products turn into revenue. Where the most ambitious founders in crypto and beyond bet the house. Where early adopters turn to find the next brilliant app or the next 1000x. And where the next 10m users in crypto get onboarded.
One way to check this thesis is to treat revenue from Farcaster companies as a leading indicator for user influx. You can find these indicators on the farconomy dashboard we built with Woj.
