jakiro
After five years of establishment, a total of approximately US$180 million in financing, and a valuation that once approached US$1 billion,FarcasterOfficially admitted: Web3 social road has not been successful.
Recently, Dan Romero, the co-founder of Farcaster, posted a series of posts on the platform, announcing that the team will abandon the “social-core” product strategy and instead focus entirely on the wallet (Wallet) direction.In his statement, this was not an active upgrade, but a choice forced by reality after a long period of trying.
“We tried for 4 1/2 years to be social first and it just didn’t work.”
This judgment not only means the transformation of Farcaster, but also once again pushes the structural problems of Web3 social into the spotlight.
Why Farcaster failed to become a “decentralized Twitter”
Farcaster was born in 2020, during the rising period of Web3 narrative.It attempts to solve three core problems of Web2 social platforms:
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Platform monopoly and censorship
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User data does not belong to you
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Creators cannot monetize directly
Its design ideas are quite idealistic:
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Decentralization of the protocol layer
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Clients are free to build
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Social relationships are on-chain and can be migrated
Among the many “decentralized social” projects, Farcaster was once regarded as the product closest to PMF.Especially after Warpcast emerged from the circle in 2023, a large number of KOLs settled on Crypto Twitter, making it look like the prototype of the next generation social network.
But the problem was quickly exposed.
According to Farcaster monthly active user (MAU) statistics on Dune Analytics, Farcaster’s user growth trajectory shows a very clear, but not optimistic, pattern:
For most of 2023, Farcaster’s monthly active users were almost negligible; the real growth inflection point occurred in early 2024, when MAU quickly increased from a few thousand to about 40,000 to 50,000 in a short period of time, and once reached close to 80,000 monthly active users in mid-2024.
This is Farcaster’s only real window for growth at scale since its founding.What is particularly noteworthy is that this growth did not occur during a bear market, but during a stage when the Base ecosystem was highly active and SocialFi narratives were intensively emerging.
But this window did not last long.Starting from the second half of 2024, monthly activity data dropped significantly, and showed a volatile downward trend in the following year:
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MAU rallied multiple times, but highs continue to fall lower
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By the second half of 2025, monthly activity has dropped to less than 20,000
Actually,FarcasterGrowth has been unable to “break the circle”, and its user structure is highly homogeneous:
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Crypto Practitioner
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VC
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Builder
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Crypto Native users
For ordinary users:
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High registration threshold
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Social content is seriously “internalized”
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The user experience is not better than X / Instagram
This makes FarcasterNever able to form a real network effect.
DeFi KOL Ignas bluntly stated in X (@DeFiIgnas) that Farcaster “just admitted the fact that everyone has felt for a long time”:
The network effect of X (formerly Twitter) is so strong that it’s almost impossible to defeat it head-on.This is not a problem of cryptographic narratives, but of structural barriers to social products.
That’s why Ignas summed up Farcaster’s new strategy in one sentence:
“It’s easier to add social to a wallet than to add wallet to a social product.”
This judgment essentially admits that “social networking is not the primary need of Web3.”
“Bubbles are comfortable, but numbers are cold”
If the MAU data answers “How is Farcaster doing?” then another question is: How big is the market itself?
Crypto creator Wiimee has provided a powerful set of comparative data on the X.
After “accidentally jumping out of the encrypted content circle”, Wiimee created content for the general public for four consecutive days. His analysis data showed that he received 2.7 million impressions in about 100 hours, more than twice the views of all his encrypted content in a year.
He said:
“Crypto Twitter is a bubble, and it’s very small. It’s better to speak to the general audience in four years than to speak to insiders in four years.”
This is not a direct criticism of Farcaster, but reveals a lower-level problem: encrypted social itself is an ecology that is highly self-cyclical but has extremely weak spillover capabilities.When content, relationships, and attention are all limited to the same group of native users, no matter how sophisticated the protocol design is, it will be difficult to break through the upper limit of market size.
This leaves Farcaster facing not a “product that’s not good enough” but “not enough people on the floor.”
Wallet, but ran out of PMF
What really changed Farcaster’s internal judgment was not a reflection on social interaction, but an unexpected verification of his wallet.
In early 2024, Farcaster launched a built-in wallet in the app, originally intended only to supplement the social experience.However, judging from the usage data, the growth slope, usage frequency and retention performance of the wallet are obviously different from the social module.
Dan Romero emphasized in his public response:
“Every new and retained wallet user is a new user of the protocol.”
This sentence itself has revealed the logical core of route adjustment.What the wallet faces is not the “desire for expression”, but real and rigid on-chain behavioral needs: transfers, transactions, signatures, and interaction with new applications.
In October, Farcaster acquired the AI Agent-driven token issuance tool Clanker and gradually integrated it into the wallet system. This move was also seen as the team’s clear bet on the “wallet first” path.
From a business perspective, this direction has obvious advantages:
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Used more frequently
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The path to monetization is clearer
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Be more closely bound to the ecology on the chain
In contrast, social is more like the icing on the cake than the engine that drives growth.
While the wallet strategy held up statistically, community controversy ensued.
Multiple long-time users made it clear that they were not opposed to the wallet itself, but were uncomfortable with the cultural shift that had come with it: from “user” to “trader” and from “co-builder” to “old guard.”
This exposes a real problem: when product direction changes, community sentiment is often more difficult to transfer than the roadmap.Farcaster’s protocol layer is still decentralized, but the choice of product direction is still concentrated in the hands of the team.This contradiction is amplified during transformation.
Romero has since admitted there were communication issues but also made it clear the team had made its choice.
This is not arrogance, but a common realistic decision in the later stages of the life cycle of entrepreneurial projects.In this sense, Farcaster gave up not so much the social ideal as the illusion of its scale.
Perhaps as one observer put it:
“Let users stay for the tools first, then there will be room for social networking.”
Farcaster’s choice may not be the most romantic, but it may be the closest to reality. In-depth + integration of native financial tools (wallets, transactions, issuance) is the practical path to transform into sustainable business value.
