Author: defioasis
Last week, Vitalik Buterin’s Twitter account was hacked and used to post phishing links, resulting in losses of over $690,000. Slowmist Cosine pointed out after research that the phishing organization behind the hacking of Vitalik’s Twitter is still connected to the current hot and crazy PinkDrainer, and the hacking method may be SIM hijacking or other possibilities. Two days later, Vitalik confirmed on the decentralized social media platform Farcaster that his Twitter account was indeed attacked by SIM card hijacking. The reason may be that his phone number was exposed when registering for Twitter Blue. It was previously advised not to use phone numbers for identity verification, but unfortunately, this was not realized. Vitalik stated that he has uninstalled Twitter and joined Farcaster, where account recovery can be controlled through Ethereum addresses.
Farcaster is a decentralized protocol for building social applications, which can be used through front-ends such as Opencast and Warpcast. Farcaster received a $30 million investment led by a16z in 2022. This article will briefly analyze this decentralized social protocol favored by Vitalik and a16z.
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Social network activities can be simply understood as a group of users interacting with each other, such as sending messages (text, images, audio, etc.) to others, liking, commenting, and sharing their posts. In centralized social networks, this group of users can only interact within a specific social application, while in decentralized social networks, a group of users from different applications are allowed to interact in a cross-application manner.
This also presents challenges, which Farcaster classifies as the four core issues of decentralized social networks: identity, authentication, availability, and consistency. Identity, namely usernames, allows users to switch between different social applications and act as their identities; authentication ensures that users can trust the sources of messages they receive; availability ensures that user data is always accessible in different applications; consistency refers to the social network rules that all front-end applications need to consistently support and enforce.
Farcaster’s Solutions
Farcaster’s social network covers three layers: identity layer, data layer, and application layer. The identity layer is based on Ethereum and determines the operations and authorization methods that can be performed on the network. Identity and authentication are the core aspects; the data layer stores information authorized by the identity layer and makes it available; the application layer consumes the information stored in the data layer.
(1) Identity: Farcaster ID (FID)
Farcaster introduces usernames and Farcaster IDs (FIDs) as user social identities, where FID is a unique and tamper-proof identifier for user identities introduced by Farcaster. FID is a string of numbers bound to the user’s main address. Although using digital identifiers to represent users is not appropriate for a decentralized system, users can choose to register a Farcaster name as a username and associate it with FID. Farcaster manages usernames in a dedicated namespace, and usernames may be reclaimed, while FIDs will not be.
Usernames and Farcaster IDs will be reflected in two different contracts on Ethereum, the Name Registry and the FID Registry, which together form the foundation of Farcaster user identity.
It is worth mentioning that user identity recovery benefits from FID. Users can set up another address in advance as a credential to recover their Farcaster identity. This other address can be their own another wallet address, another known Farcaster user address, or even a third-party custodian.
(2) Authentication
Message authentication benefits from Farcaster ID. When a user receives a message, by checking the FID of the sender and looking up the corresponding public key (address) on the Ethereum chain, they can verify if the signature sender is generated by that address, thus confirming the true source of the message.
In order to protect the issue of private keys on devices (private keys need to be loaded onto the device application to generate signatures), Farcaster introduces the concept of Signers. Signers are Ed25519 keys generated off-chain, and users register signers by transacting with the KeyRegistry using the public key of the signer. Then the private key can be used to sign and publish messages to the network.
(3) Availability: Storage Leasing
In centralized social applications, users store information on servers similar to RSS servers and retrieve all data on the network by indexing all these servers. Farcaster introduces hubs for storing data, and when different users interact socially, they download copies of each other’s information and store them.
However, to prevent hubs from being inundated with spam information, Farcaster charges users rent for storing data on the network, which is also the main source of Farcaster’s revenue. Users rent storage space by paying an annual fee to Farcaster, which can suppress spam information and encourage users to clear low-value data. Storage is managed and tracked on-chain by the StorageRegistry contract.
(4) Consensus
Farcaster is not a direct social application, but a lower-level social protocol, similar to the relationship between the Lens Protocol and Lenster. Currently, the applications built on Farcaster mainly include the Alphacaster, a Web3 social application supported by DAO, Discove for creating and sharing, Jam for on-chain groups and personalized subscriptions, the open-source Twitter-style frontend Opencast and Warpcast, and the social aggregator Yup that can be cross-posted to Twitter and Lens. The Farcaster frontend used by Vitalik is Warpcast. In terms of logic, Warpcast is basically the same as the core logic of Twitter. You can view posts from “world groups” and leave comments, reposts, and likes on posts (threads) from users you follow.
Applications built on Farcaster provide consumption scenarios for data stored on hubs. Application servers communicate with hubs, download all information, organize and categorize this information to create applications for different user experiences, and then provide APIs for users on different clients to use.
Applications built on Farcaster need to follow rough consensus and run code as the governance model for Farcaster. When someone proposes a FIP (Farcaster Improvement Proposal), it will be accepted and the code will be released after receiving recognition from protocol developers, application developers, and users. Changes to Farcaster will occur accordingly. Consensus is reached through agreement or rejection by different parties. Farcaster does not have a binding voting procedure or an official role with veto power.
Social Ecosystem Partners
Through Farcaster identity accounts, users can link to other applications or communities, including Alertcaster for user reminders, Move-to-Earn Blobs, Eventcaster for on-chain social event announcements, Farcaster Network for ecosystem metrics tracking, FarQuest for earning points by completing tasks, Frens for messaging, Interface for Ethereum on-chain exploration, Kiwi News for decentralized hacker news, Launchcaster for finding the latest Web3 projects, Neynar for personalized media sources, LianGuairagraph for publishing and communication, Pincaster for finding interesting topics, Purple DAO for DAO tools created by Nouns Builder, Search via Raycast for search engine, Searchcaster for searching using API/GUI, Surveycaster for exploring Farcaster community content, Tipcast for tipping and rewards, and Unlonely for token-driven real-time streaming.
Currently, Farcaster is still in the testing phase and users can submit a waiting list. Both Farcaster and Lens Protocol serve as underlying protocols for building social networks, but compared to Lens Protocol, Farcaster is further away from the user spotlight and focuses more on developer and application creation. As of mid-September, official data showed that Farcaster has just exceeded 20,000 total users and has over 3.8 million historical messages on hubs. After migrating to Optimism, Farcaster has started filtering out spam messages to open up to more users. Although there is no news about Farcaster’s airdrop plan, Farcaster has included the FIP governance module as an important part of the protocol, making it worth the user’s experience and interaction.
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