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Crypto Collapsing As Tariffs Go Live w/ Farcaster’s @dwr
Recorded: April 3, 2025 Duration: 0:53:25Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, shared insights on the evolving landscape of decentralized social networks, highlighting the platform's growth, innovative features, and the impact of regulatory advancements on the crypto ecosystem. Key topics included the Stablecoin Act's progress, user engagement strategies, and the integration of yield mechanisms through USDC rewards.
Full Transcription
Thank you. I'm going to put a little bit more of a little bit more.
I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more.
I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more.
I'm going to make a little bit more of a little bit more. welcome in everybody to another episode of coinage today as we are watching market sell off
a little bit which we're going to definitely dig into later on in today's show. But if you're watching this, throw a like on it, retweet it. We're going to cover all of that, including the huge announcements that we got. Paul Atkins advancing in the Senate Banking Committee on his vote, as well as the sell-offs in the market, not just crypto, but stock market as well. As we saw a huge advancement out of the House Financial Services Committee in the Stablecoin Act.
That one we're going to dig into as well.
But today's show is one that has been in the works for a very long time.
Excited to dig back into the world of Web3 Social and what Farcaster is up to. If you haven't dabbled in Farcaster yet, highly encourage you to do so for the reasons we're about to get into,
because it's very interesting for anyone in the crypto space to explore. But today,
very happy to have on with us here on Coinage, the co-founder of Farcaster, Dan Romero,
joins us once again. Dan, so good to see you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's a very interesting time, I will say, to be building in crypto, I think,
this year in the year of our Lord, 2025.
But it's been years since we talked to you about the progress at Farkaster.
Just kind of want to start with maybe for some people who may have dabbled in it, you know, months ago, years ago, how big the change has been.
Because when we covered it first, we were calling it like a decentralized Twitter, decentralized X.
But it doesn't really
seem fair to call Farcaster that anymore.
So how's the evolution been?
Yeah, so we've kind of made a pivot in the last year or so to tack much more into being
a crypto native social network.
I think when we started working on Farcaster four years ago, decentralized social protocols
were frankly more contrarian, more niche.
And I think our original approach was, okay, take Twitter and let's make it decentralized.
I think there's a bunch of stuff that's changed since Twitter, including a name change.
And I think there's a lot more competition more broadly within decentralized social networks.
And so I think for Farcaster
to win, we have to have something where we're differentiated. And I think where we clearly
are differentiated is the fact that by definition, the way the kind of system is designed, every
single user has a crypto wallet, Ethereum wallet. And so we've kind of made a lot of progress over
the last, you know, kind of six to nine months where we've added a lot more crypto-native functionality, including an embedded wallet.
So we're kind of at the point where every user now has kind of a fully featured embedded Ethereum wallet inside their social media app.
And we have an increasing number of people with kind of funded balances, something on the order of 70,000 funded wallets.
So anytime you're kind of using Farcaster, you can kind of assume that most of the other people who are active on the network on any given day actually have a live crypto wallet with a balance in the app.
Right. So it's none of this kind of like dance between like switching to another app or like, oh, it only works on desktop.
It's like, nope, this thing works on mobile.
It's entirely crypto native.
And then we have kind of a whole mini app ecosystem.
We previously called them frames, but we've evolved that functionality pretty significantly over the last year.
So it's kind of this.
Everyone has a crypto wallet and there's a bunch of stuff to do with the crypto wallet.
Yeah, I think, I mean, it's been an interesting kind of like evolution, even outside of Farcaster, just industry-wide.
The idea of like abstracting away certain things, and I feel like Coinbase has also kind of woken up to that with what they've done with their wallet in terms of making it way easier for everybody to deal with crypto and wallets.
with crypto and wallets. And, you know, same thing with Privy, by the way, a lot of these
infrastructure plays that kind of abstract away the idea of even making the user deal with all
that is pretty interesting in that, you know, makes on ramping way easier. But you mentioned
some of those things. What are those metrics that you look at? Because I know there's Dune
Analytics, I'm looking at them. They got like a bunch of different metrics that they track in
terms of on-chain things that happen with Farcaster, whether it's casts, whether it's active
users, whether it's how often people are casting a day. I mean, for you, Dan, like what are the
metrics that you're most focused on now in terms of looking at growth? Or is it still so early that
you don't really care about those things because you guys are experimenting kind of with different things that might make
Farcaster more fun than traditional web or traditional social.
Yeah, so we definitely care about growth, right?
Daily active users, that's the lifeblood of any social network, right?
If you don't have people using the thing, then it's a science experiment.
And so I think daily active users has been our North Star for the last four years.
And it's something that we'll continue to be focused on.
I think there are a few more nuances now in the sense that I think for us, a user that has a funded wallet is kind of like on average more valuable to the network than someone who's kind of just like has signed up, might like a few posts, but isn't necessarily fully crypto native.
you post, but isn't necessarily fully Cripple native.
And so we've made a big effort to get people to fund wallets, which I think is a good proxy.
Actually, the Circle S1, which came out, I think, two days ago, they have a definition
that they're trying to push in TBD, if that ends up becoming an industry metric, where
ends up becoming an industry metric where it's MEUs, meaningful wallets. And I think that they're
it's MEUs, meaningful wallets.
roughly saying about $10 in a funded USDC balance is an approximate for like, okay, this is like a
way to think of a user. And it's not perfect because obviously you can programmatically create
addresses and you could move $10 into a bunch of them. But I think in our experience, there's a bunch of
accounts that have kind of like, call it, you know, a dollar or less, like dust, basically.
When you actually get towards $10, there's a nice overlap between, you know, kind of people who are
actually also actively engaging in the social network and doing a bunch of other kind of
behaviors that kind of indicate like, okay, this is like a real person. In addition,
we've actually made a big push over the last two or three months on verifications. And so
this has been tried a bunch of times in crypto before. And then obviously you have kind of like
frontier things like WorldCoin with the eye scanning. But our point of view is we have a
couple of different signals to kind of like represent like what a user should be.
And so the first is how do you engage on the network?
Do you get engagement back?
So you can kind of think of that as like kind of like a social, you know, kind of credibility rating.
Right. Just like how do you participate on the network?
You have this idea of like a funded balance, like what is your activity on chain?
And then the last one is this verification idea.
So we've had over 150,000 users connect an X account.
So that's reasonable proxy to say, OK, well,
if you have an X account, then now connecting that
to your Farcaster, it's a slight bump on credibility.
Again, you always have.
Well, I wanted to ask about that, because I do think
that is one of those interesting areas where it's like,
I always, when we first had you on the show back then it was like okay I love the idea and it wasn't just
Farcaster to be fair there were a lot of different web three social projects popping up and one of
the things by the way I wanted your take on kind of how how worse x has gotten in one regard which
I think if you ask anyone in crypto is botting and the idea of how bad it is and with web three
social like you said kind of like what
WorldCoin is working on in terms of like proof of personhood, it seems like such an obvious thing
to do in terms of trying to tie some sort of on-chain action or something that, I don't know,
I guess obviously we've seen in crypto, a lot of things can still be botted on-chain.
But pairing those things, as you just said, to make it less botted on Farcaster
seems like it would be like an obvious advantage
over what we're seeing on X.
And perhaps to be more specific,
a larger attack vector for you guys
to kind of solve a growing problem on X.
Is that fair?
Or how do you think about it?
Yeah, look, I think the death of X has been way overblown,
right? Like people were like, oh, X is X is going to go to zero. It didn't still here. It's still
probably but it is worse. I think that's fair to say. I would agree with you.
Subjectively, and I think anecdotally, virtually everyone I talked to says my algo feels cooked or
there's probably some truth to that because I think you are what you measure.
And I think ultimately time spent in app clearly is the thing that they're
optimizing for.
Thus the suppression of links,
which I think is like that,
that loses the essence of what made X Twitter so valuable.
It was,
it was a distribution platform for creative people,
entrepreneurs,
anyone, if you think about it, the universal currency of I'm building something else is a link. It was a distribution platform for creative people, entrepreneurs, anyone.
If you think about it, the universal currency of I'm building something else is a link.
And breaking that social contract on Twitter of the ability, whether it's a podcaster or journalist, an entrepreneur, the ability to not share what you're working on via a link and having that get suppressed.
That's been a huge boon for us in the sense that creatives who use Farcaster love the fact that we don't suppress links.
Well, it's a perfect segue, by the way.
And I'll let you answer kind of the other piece, too.
But I just want to throw this in here because it was a learning that I just had as well.
Texas, I don't know if you can see this over here.
But I also, we just had Hester Purse on.
And to be fair, I think there are a lot of crypto community members on Farcaster, naturally.
And so maybe the content there does better if you're posting things about crypto. But Hester Purse came on the show. We posted a clip on X. We posted a clip on Farcaster, naturally. And so maybe the content there does better if you're posting things about crypto.
But Hester Purse came on the show.
We posted a clip on X.
We posted a clip on Farcaster.
And lo and behold, the engagement on Farcaster was way higher for the first time in terms
of just kind of an apples to apples one to one post.
And that triggered me to be like, OK, we should be posting more over there.
And to be fair, again, I don't know if that's true across all niches, but at least for us
in the crypto niche, very true. And, you know, again, we had experimented
before with channels and the idea of what Farcaster unlocked for our community there.
But yeah, Dan, same question there in terms of like, it's tricky because TikTok and the idea
of turning X into TikTok, I think is where I'm speaking from as a journalist, to your point,
and trying to like, you know, again, for journalists, it's been a tough go. But for what
you're trying to build on Farcaster, is there maybe a fear of also getting caught in the,
do we want to be the TikTok? Do we want to be the X? Do we want to like, or maybe you've kind of
evolved to be like, look, we're gonna be our own thing. Kind of like cool runnings when the Jamaican
when the Jamaican bobsled team woke up and said,
bobsled team woke up and said, we don't want to be the Swiss. We were going to be Jamaican,
we don't want to be the Swiss.
We were going to be Jamaican, if that's fair.
Yeah, I haven't thought of cool runnings in a while,
so it's an interesting analogy.
But I think the way to think about it is
Twitter is the simplest of the kind of like major social networks
to implement, right?
Text, it's like the lowest barrier to entry.
I mean, maybe you could argue that Instagram taking a photo
is even easier than writing a witty tweet. But it's also the most kind of like malleable in the sense that
you can actually kind of use the format of a tweet, right? A short text post, we call them CAS,
to distribute anything, link, a video, an image, text. And so I think that that's like a good
baseline for like the core social functionality.
But I think the thing that's going to differentiate us is the crypto stuff.
And the one thing I wanted to kind of just point back to is the whole point is we are
increasingly adding a bunch of other signals to the protocol, which by the way, all that data is
completely permissionless for people. So connecting other Ethereum wallets, Solana wallets,
X account, phone number, And that one's private.
But the whole point is we're trying to get to a point where you have a bunch of transparent
signals as to your account being credible.
And that is really powerful for developers because increasingly they're looking at the
active user base of Farcaster, while much smaller than X, as a place to actually go
to market, getting their first thousand users
first 10 000 transactions uh targeting users for airdrops because we're putting this data out in
transparent way for developers to actually make their own decisions and i think that's been a big
a big change over the last year whereas we had a lot of growth last year but we didn't have that
data all set up yet. Whereas a year later,
the percent of users that have kind of a set of signals that allow people to kind of decide,
okay, this seems like actually a verified user. And that transparency just doesn't exist on X. The only thing you have on X is you have a blue check mark that says I paid $8 a month versus
being able to kind of connect all that other activity transparently and then offering an API
in our case, which is free,
for people to be able to do whatever they want. Yes. And that would be, I guess, my follow-up
point to when I say made X worse is that idea is that, you know, again, as a legacy blue check
mark, if I am cast as such by the rest of the X community, it was a thing that did kind of
distinguish, okay, a trusted account versus not. And now if you just buy it, it does create a very different dynamic.
But for you guys too, I do wonder around some of that too,
because I know there's the Coinbase connection for you in terms of coming from Coinbase
and the idea of a lot of the users, early users,
probably in the same kind of ecosystem and potentially also Coinbase,
ex-Coinbase employees as well, who have a lot of followers. And I'm not trying to say, hey, where are my Farcaster or Warpcast followers? But I am curious about
kind of like the idea of how you tweak things as it grows, like if that happened.
And to be fair, there was a lot of gaming on chain in general. We were just talking
to people who were trying to build the same thing, like reputation scores on chain.
Very difficult to do if you're kind of building on top of the idea of nothing in crypto before us was gamed.
Because you kind of have to start with an admission that like maybe that's true, that maybe some of these NFT projects with a bunch of like holders are really just like eight dudes who have a bunch of wallets who are all the same guy.
like eight dudes who have a bunch of wallets who are all the same guy.
So like, how do you, how do you kind of,
and maybe it's just tweaking the algorithm as you go,
but like how does that work in terms of correcting for maybe on-chain things
or games that were played earlier to like kind of inch more into legitimacy, I guess?
Yeah, so I think the big thing is no one signal is a panacea.
And I think there's a little bit one signal is a pancia. And I think
there's a little bit too much, call it religious belief that like, oh, what happens on chain is
the actual most valuable or like a lot of activity on chain makes you more credible. Like it just,
like if you look at the data and then you kind of look at the accounts when they connect to an
account, you have plenty of accounts that have like crazy on-chain history that are posting AI generated slum. And so, and then other people who have a
smaller footprint, but post really interesting content. So I think it's a blend of signals.
And so you kind of have to, again, be thinking about what's happening on-chain, what's happening
on Farcaster itself, which, you know, like proof of work almost in the sense that like getting other
people who have a lot of social credibility to engage with you is an indication you're probably
interesting or, you know, like that, that, that's hard. It's very hard to get credible people to
engage with AI slop at scale. And then adding those additional verifications just further
creates a proof of work barrier where if you have a verified phone number,
yes, can you go spin up phone numbers en masse in certain countries?
Yes, but that phone number itself is just yet another piece of friction that if you take it as a kind of like a full picture, that's what I think is working really well
with developers because now they actually have kind of like a much richer data set to
kind of look at any given user and kind of make a determination of like oh this is actually someone that i want to you know be engaging with building for airdrop
etc can i let me just ask you founder to founder here on kind of like building uh both of us are
building in the us both americans uh both watching what's playing out right now with crypto and it's
kind of a weird time because it's like prices are down now in 2025,
pretty considerably. If you look at the ETH chart right now, it's not looking good, Dan.
But in terms of the excitement of just like, hey, pivoted completely in terms of there are a lot more things you can do on chain as a Web3 native project here in the US without fear, I think.
And so when you kind of pair those dots and think about, all right, price is not moving in the right
direction. But as far as like being able to build again in the US, never been better. And so when you kind of pair those dots and think about, all right, price is not moving in the right direction. But as far as like being able to build again in the U.S., never been better.
And so my question to you is now that that switch has been flipped and this might get into things you can't necessarily talk about.
But if you were to hypothetically talk about them, I mean, the idea of like tokens being launched on Farcaster, like you said, it's a very native Web3 experience.
idea of tokens being launched on
Farcaster, like you said, it's a very native Web3
experience. Clanker,
the likes of other things where these tokens
can be built and bought and
sold in a very unique way
that you can't really do on Twitter yet.
How do you look at that in terms of what
Farcaster has planned to further kind of lean
into the network effects of what you've built
and what should people expect
on the roadmap in the efforts to do so?
Yeah, so this is my 11th year in crypto.
I started at Coinbase in 2014.
I've never been more bullish from a regulatory standpoint.
Like, regulatory has always been a bearish component of things.
Like, it just, like, was not making progress in the U.S.
Like, maybe a little bit every so often, and then you have, like, two or three steps back.
And things like FTX didn't help, right? But in terms of like what is coming down the pipeline
in the sense that, one, you've just had a radical shift in terms of regulation by enforcement action,
which the SEC has dropped all of those cases, which I think is phenomenal for the industry,
especially for the kind of like good players who, you know, a company like Coinbase that's trying
to do the right thing wants to engage with regulators. So that is a massive improvement. And then I think you mentioned
at the beginning of the show that you have two significant pieces of legislation that are working
its way through the House. Last year, we had FIT 21 get passed, died in the Senate. Now we have
kind of the Stables Act, which I think stablecoins, you know, massive improvement to the underlying financial system.
Once you see actual legislation get passed, I think you're going to see a rush of fintechs and traditional financial firms kind of have the green light to actually start experimenting with stablecoins,
which I think just further is going to create this kind of like very clear use case
for crypto that is not speculative right like i think a big critique of the industry has always
been it's too speculative well if stable coins are kind of enshrined in law you're you're going to
have uh i think a massive upswell in just like innovation building on top of stable coin friends
yeah and then i think the market structure bill which uh i don't know if you've been following
brian armstrong was in dc week. He was talking about this.
The goal is to get that passed before the August recess. Right.
And so that is kind of, I think, even more important long term for crypto because it really kind of addresses this idea that everything can be a token.
And there's a lot of nuance to go figure out there. That bill, I think, ultimately still requires the SEC and the CFC to sit down and define some spectrum and kind of a modern version of a Howey test for digital assets in the sense that like, what is a security, what is a commodity?
you're just going to see a higher quality entrepreneur on the margin entering into
crypto and thinking about how to use tokens to build fundamentally valuable new things.
And it's not going to get rid of the kind of like negative elements of crypto overnight.
Like you're still going to have, you know, whatever you want to call it, your grips,
your ponzies, whatever, whatever kind of legit criticism, I think of a bunch of things in
crypto. But once you actually create that, that kind of like clarity on the legal side of things, you know, it's funny that you have this whole conversation about tariffs and like creating uncertainty.
Crypto has been living with a crazy amount of uncertainty for over a decade, its entire existence.
And so to think that within 2025, we could get stable coins, which I think are really,
really important about getting the traditional financial system more merged into crypto,
and then some type of market structure that allows responsible teams the ability to experiment
and use tokens as a novel mechanic for building new things. I think this is going to be a golden
age for people who are taking a little bit more of a long-term approach and building something valuable, right?
It's not magic number go up technology.
It is don't deal with the government suing you for trying to build something that is fundamentally new and interesting.
Well, I couldn't agree more.
Again, as a crypto project here, we just had Hester Purse on the show.
We built our model, by the way.
I think there's plenty of things that I would hope to work with the Farcaster team on in that. CoinEdge started with the idea
of, you know, one mint per wallet per IP address to show personhood. Just in terms of when we put
out our first interview with Do Kwon, it kind of blew up and attracted a bunch of people. But it
was really cool to see them being individuals come to us to watch a piece of content. So we started
with like the ground basis for having a real community of real users
and real people who watch our stuff.
And then plugging that into projects like yours
is kind of why I think a lot of people,
at least those who are truly building in Web3,
love the idea of interoperability
in terms of porting communities
from one ecosystem to another
and actually having some of this work
the way that we all hoped it would.
But to our second point,
the idea of us being a community-owned outlet that had just paid dividends, work the way that we all hoped it would. But to your second point, the idea of us
being a community-owned outlet that had just paid dividends, by the way, the idea of being a co-op
in the U.S., being invited down to D.C. to talk about our model is very cool to see, like, okay,
like, we can pay these distributions back to NFT holders in a legal way here in the U.S. Like,
again, that was a risk that would have been crazy two years ago when StonerCats was getting sued,
everybody was getting sued, wouldn't have wanted to do it.
But the idea of kind of building in the U.S. and having a new SEC and crypto task force that wants to incubate and foster innovation in the U.S.
For me personally, is night and day.
But you mentioned stable coins and kind of the idea.
I'll ask the question in a different way this time, Dan.
Because I've been playing around, like I said, on Farkaster.
I'm scrolling around right now, actually.
I did perhaps play a little bit of a fun April Fool's joke with a little misinformation of me and David Sachs.
But the idea of kind of getting rewards on here is a thing.
And right now those rewards are paid out in USDC, like you said.
So how do you kind of look at that?
Because similarly, we also don't have a token in terms of our rewards.
Stablecoins I think are just kind of easier for people to wrap their head around and just
like I want a dollar instead of this coin that might go down.
So how do you kind of, as you get clarity, what's your thought process around that?
Because there is indeed, I think we've seen it with a few airdrops, a lot of good network
effects that come from having a native token to power a platform like a Farcaster.
Yeah, so maybe just to start, I think we're doing the USDC payouts because it's an experiment.
I mean, we've been running it for a bit and we're iterating on the algo each week.
But it seems to work pretty well on YouTube and X where creators,
people producing the content that make people come to that network get paid.
I think X, the bar is really high. YouTube is pretty high too.
For us, we said there should be no bar. And it's strictly based on a kind of algorithm that is like, how much engagement do you
get relative to other people on the network? And then we actually made a tweak that has been
somewhat successful in that we adjust for the number of followers. So the idea is that if
you're an account that has a lot of distribution, you actually get penalized a bit relative to a
new user. So you could do it as we're boosting new users and penalizing kind of,
but we try to level the playing field a bit of like other,
otherwise obviously only the people who have the most distribution
get the rewards every week.
But we're up to 20, I think close to $25,000 every week for just pure,
you know, if you post, like you have the eligibility,
there are 2000 people a week.
So there's kind of
like a sliding scale of what you get paid out and when i talk to people it's actually it's not about
the money that they're making it's the fact that there's kind of a leaderboard yeah you have it
live here um and it's like i've been on social media for 15 plus years and i've never earned a
dime and a lot of these people actually have pretty big followings like you know some of
these journalists that are actually at the top of the list this week like they have stuff on x they
never get paid and so the idea is just the idea that you can permissionlessly and programmably
send usdc uh to people because everyone has a wallet is i think just a novel feature of the
protocol and the product and so i think where we want to get to is a place where we want to get to the idea
that we have a sustainable model for Farcaster, right?
Like we should be making money as a protocol in a way that the rewards
are actually paid for by whatever the revenue of the protocol is making.
And in a world where that doesn't exist i think whatever
mechanism you want to do usdc token what you're going to end up with is kind of a one-time thing
up front and then price go down and and so it like it'd be the equivalent of like taking a company
public right where you you don't actually have a product and market or revenue.
And we kind of saw some of that stuff happen in 2021 with SPACs and whatever,
and that didn't work out so well.
So I don't think the laws of gravity as it relates to kind of like what creates something of value and creates value on a long-term basis
magically changed because of crypto.
I know there are a bunch of people on crypto Twitter who would be happy
and just be like, oh, just give me a token.
I can sell it.
That's valuable to me.
But yes, I understand that is valuable to you, but it's not valuable to the protocol
long term.
So I think where I approach it from is you have to actually have a sustainable model
that is creating value long term, that is repeatable.
And so that is the thing to figure out.
And Farcaster is repeatable. And so that is the thing to figure out and Farcaster is not there.
Yeah, I think, I mean, I couldn't agree more
in terms of we saw a lot of projects launch in 21, 22
in terms of NFT projects,
like kind of use it as their main revenue driver
and then not really have anything else,
not like a shared mission
or not have like a sustainable business model
for like where that NFT project
could also continue to make money
outside of just selling things.
And then, you know, we saw the chart goes down into the right normally is like how that happens. And to your point, we've kind of experimented recently too with a meme coin of our
own, uh, in a mechanic that is tied to, like you said, tied to burning them as more people watch
our content on these platforms. And you know, right now it's, it's mostly YouTube that we track,
but, uh, could potentially add Farcaster to that and probably should as we post more content over there.
But, Dan, that is interesting, too, because we had Jesse on the show not too long ago.
I was thinking back to like the Kaido token drop and like when people were selling that and he was kind of being like, hey, you don't need to sell these things all the time, like support a project.
And, you know, like you just said sometimes users
people and projects incentives maybe aren't aligned um and i'd be curious to get kind of
get your take in terms of being a project that's working i guess it might not be fair to say working
with usdc but using usdc on airdrops um working with coinbase wallet and like other ecosystems
out there like how does Farcaster
think about, like this meme coin that we launched is on Solana, how does Farcaster think about
like working with other ecosystems as well beyond just like ETH or base, or I guess,
you know, integrating with Coinbase?
Yeah, so I think it's important to think of Farcaster as this kind of layer that sits
on top.
Like we're minimally on chain, not maximally on chain in terms of the protocol itself.
But what people post and what distribution people get is actually it's agnostic, right?
So you could be building something on Solana and posting about that on Farcaster and that works completely fine.
We don't suppress links.
So, you know, we actually had there was a there's an app and I think there's still kind of in beta that's on Solana called the Appster
built by a Farcaster native, you know, kind of user in the early community as a bunch of people
from Farcaster, even though it's on Solana. And so I think that is important for us in that
the goal here is to be a crypto native social network and being only tied to one chain or one ecosystem is not what we're aiming for.
That said, I think it's worth pointing out the reason there's a big association, Farcaster and Base, is because Base has done a phenomenal job, at least within the EVM ecosystem, of getting a lot of people to build on it.
And there's a lot of stuff that people actually want to do on base.
And so I think that that is the, the inevitable reality is, is the,
the kind of like chains and ecosystems that do a great job onboarding
builders, getting people to build interesting stuff.
Naturally it would be popular on Farcaster.
And I think we can do a better job on, on, on the margins of like, you know,
we can add some work for Solana in our embedded wallet.
That will probably happen at some point.
But I think the core here is,
if you look at kind of base and Solana,
just stepping back from Farcaster,
I think the reason they're doing so well
is they've done a really good job
kind of going to market with builders.
And I think that other ecosystems
probably could learn a thing or two
from whatever the playbooks that those teams have had.
And so I think we are keen to work on
with any team that has like,
hey, we have a group of builders,
they're looking for distribution.
We have a kind of developer lead now, Linda G,
who previously was doing VC investment within Cripo,
and then recently was building an app on Farcaster called Bountycaster. She's been kind of leading our developer go to
market recently. And that's been a huge boon. But to the degree that there are other people out
there and other ecosystems, we're happy to talk. Yeah, I think it's I mean, again, I think that
we've seen that in terms of like embracing a lot of this and it's it's interesting now being an eth dao
essentially here with our nfts that allow people to co-own coinage being on eth mainnet and then
having a solana meme coin has been a very interesting experiment for us personally
um and so as a social platform like you guys i think that that's that's kind of uh an interesting
kind of answer just in terms of straddling different ecosystems because i think you know
it's it's hard to do it well but but important for users, I suppose, depending on where they're coming from.
There is something that you mentioned before we started, which was kind of a leaning into previously called frames now kind of mini apps.
The idea of like what builders can do on the app in the app or on Farcastro, I should say.
The idea of one of them being March Madness and congrats to
you and your Dukies. Duke in the big Final Four. But Bracky was one of those things that I think a
lot of people had fun with just in terms of like doing this on chain in a mini app playing. It's
not something you can do on Twitter. So to talk to me about that and kind of what it represents
in terms of where you hope Farcaster goes next. Yeah, so we launched Frames last year and kind of what it represents in terms of where you hope Forecaster goes next.
Yeah, so we launched Frames last year as kind of this, you know, interactive widget that exists in a feed.
The functionality was relatively limited,
but it was pretty amazing how creative developers were
in terms of using the kind of format to create
interesting experiences.
Bunch of like someone built a chess engine,
like to play chess and like very
kind of clunky, otherwise UI, not the, not the chess game itself.
Or, you know, there's a famous, like someone did Girl Scout cookie, like
checkout, which was, which was pretty cool.
We've significantly involved, evolved the kind of like developer ecosystem
around this in, and we've actually moved towards
what basically Telegram has. So Telegram has this mini app concept. They are full web apps. So you
can kind of whatever you can do on a web page, you can now do in a mini app. And I think that's
important, especially if you want to build kind of higher fidelity games or kind of other experiences.
And the other important thing is it makes it actually really easy
for an existing developer.
Let's say you have your classic,
like, you know, Web3 style site
with the connect to wallet.
You can kind of wrap that
in our kind of developer SDK.
And basically what you get out of that
is it now can natively open up
within Farcaster apps,
which we have one and, you know, a bunch of people with funded wallets now can open up and interact with it on mobile and it works really well.
And then Coinbase space is actually in the process of rebuilding Coinbase wallet.
And within the next month or two, that existing ecosystem of millions of users are going to have access to all these mini apps.
And so what we're optimistic on is base launches there. You imagine one or two other wallets in
the kind of Ethereum ecosystem, maybe one in Solana, launch functionality similar over the
next year. You have a place where as a developer, you can write once and then launch everywhere and
write and be in front of people on mobile, which I think this is a thing I've been pounding the table for the last few years on is crypto is a very desktop oriented builder culture, right?
Just like people sit at their computers all day, like all the classic themes of people just like kind of like being locked in looking at their screen. But the reality is most consumers spend their kind of
leisure, entertainment, casual time on a phone.
And just from our stats,
like people on Farcaster spend 80, 85% of their time
on mobile.
And so if you can't make a crypto experience work really,
really well on mobile, like no app switching, no friction,
it's just not gonna, it's gonna be DOA in terms of like any amount of scale beyond
like kind of like that core group of people who are on crypto Twitter.
And so what we're optimistic on is mini apps across a variety of crypto wallets, that's
the goal, become just like this great way for anyone building something in crypto to
grow at that consumer scale.
Yeah, I think, I mean, again, I think it's interesting to think about if push came to shove in terms of what the KPIs for 25 might be, if it's daily active users, as you said,
versus funded wallets, if the kind of idea of, you know, USDC and getting it out there as their IPO
comes up into more wallets or into more people.
Because the other thing, too, is like, I don't know, we've, in our experience with Privy, too,
it's interesting if you, like, work with someone to abstract away a wallet, they didn't even know
they have a wallet. And so, like, that kind of becomes a very interesting thing. And I'm sure
a part that you as Farcaster probably need to educate people on and becomes, like, part of the
exercise of, like, hey, you got USDC now, here's how it works, which I assume they would be super
stoked to have, as would Coinbase, as would base, like all these things kind of come
together. How hard is it for you, Dan, to kind of sit there? Because I think this happens in
one of three all the time. It's just kind of the way that it works, is that like you have pressures
from like, who are we really building for? And I imagine it'd have to be hard for you to be there
and be like, no, look, we're building for users, even though there may be pressure from other ecosystems or projects, investors, the like, to be like, no, help us do this.
And I don't know if there's ever a push-comes-to-shove moment that has become something or a decision that you had to make that was like, no, look, we're here for our users.
So I'm going to give you kind of a cheating answer, but the idea is it's build a product for crypto natives.
That's easy to use. And if you make it easy to use for the crypto natives and really do a good job making it easy to use, it should be easy to use for people who are crypto curious, right?
Like the kind of next adjacency. I don't think we're quite yet at the build for someone who has like no experience with crypto whatsoever.
I think there's still a decent amount of work to get there. But one other interesting thing, and I have a decent amount of experience with on-ramps
from my time at Coinbase, is I'm increasingly convinced that the way most people will get
their first crypto, it may be worth delineating. Like you might have a Coinbase account and you
treat that as a brokerage account. You own some Bitcoin, Ethereum, sold. I think the idea of like a user
controlled wallet and on chain. Well, by the way, we use Privy. We love Privy. I think the way to
think about that is you probably earn it airdropped. Someone tips you. So this idea that there is a
different mechanic for, I think, the average new person in crypto or, you know, their first kind of
$10 or whatever you want to call it is probably going to come not via Unrep.
And I think that changes the mentality for people is that if you didn't have to put money
into the system and instead the system gave you some amount of money for something you
did or kind of like your credibility, your reputation, proof of work.
That I think is a major net positive because it changes the perspective of what to do with this.
And actually one thing we talk to people is like,
they get their first crypto on Farcaster,
they go, oh, this feels a little different
than if I was to have bought some Bitcoin.
Like in the sense that one has the investment use case
versus this feels, oh, i kind of i i got
it now i want to be able to spend it or what what can i mint something or tip someone or and so that
that change to um the kind of like how people kind of uh associate the crypto that they have
on farmaster is i think a net positive well I think it's interesting, too, just because, like, the idea of, you know,
proof of work for creators.
Like, we have, the reason why we launched
our play button token was because we won
this YouTube creator award.
We crossed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube,
and it's kind of like one of those things
that, like, you can't buy.
You can't buy a YouTube silver play button award,
but you can earn it as a creator, like,
by feeding content to the algorithm
over and over and
over again. And so like, just to return to the question, it sounds like you're describing kind
of like proof of work for users. And the idea that maybe perhaps down the road, the more you
use Farcaster, the more you could be rewarded, not just with the stablecoin, but kind of with
whatever comes next, as you get there. Is that like kind of the way that you see it as well yeah i think proof
of work is an amazing mechanism right like you can't assuming you have a good algo and a good
you know tweaks to that so that it's not getting abused that that is the ultimately the most
valuable thing right it's like you it's it's work that you you can't cheat and then have that over time like do you feel more
do you feel more free to turn back to go back to their point do you feel more free now as a builder
in the u.s to be able to maybe again not incentivize anyone to like buy anything but when
you're thinking about merging attention and money on the internet and kind of like this new era of
the internet with web3 it's kind of like i think you'd be able to say like hey use farcaster because something's coming yeah i think that again it goes back to you you
have to have something that's sustainable and that is actually creating underlying actual value and
i think a lot of people in crypto just get lazy and they jump to kind of like oh here here's here
is value at a point in time.
There is like kind of some price action and then you just have like a permanent decline.
And so like the physics here, the first principles thing that you need to solve for is create something that creates sustainable ongoing value.
And so that I think we have to figure out, like we have yet to figure that out.
And so until then, you could still have the proof of work component of things.
You can still do USDC rewards and that works great.
And like just keep making progress.
And then should you actually figure out the sustainable kind of like value creation, then you can have a broader conversation with that.
But like don't get the order of operations wrong.
I commend anyone who's thinking long-term in crypto because it's a very rare thing to
see sometimes.
And I think for us, we've been building for three years.
Coinage has steadily grown into one of the fastest growing Web3 outlets across the YouTube
and across our site.
I'm dying over here.
But I think it's been fun to see kind of like our NFT, which constitutes ownership and membership in us,
grow over time as well as we build out sustainably.
And shout out, you said Privy.
Would love to have him sponsor the show at some point.
Shout out to Stax, who's been running ads on here for a while.
Dan, one of the last questions I got for you
in terms of just kind of wrapping this up
and going for a full circle.
I know you got Farcon coming up in New York City,
which I think will be cool just to hear more kind of ways that your community is leveraging the
platform. What are you kind of like looking forward to? What's the biggest, boldest claim
that Dan Romero can make about what to watch, whether it's Farcast or not? Just crypto in 2025
that has you most excited. I think we're going to get the first breakout app that is non-spectacular,
right? Like not like strictly a like, oh, this is a thing that has a lot of energy right now
because people are making money or betting on, you know, kind of the price of X. I think you're
going to have someone go to market because of this improved regulatory environment,
I think, that has a novel mechanic that in using that token to kind of bootstrap whatever
ecosystem. And I think marketplace is actually like a good way to think. It's like there's a
bunch of marketplaces in Web2 that if you use a token and a protocol and basically reduce the take rate or remove the take rate,
and then you kind of have the economic flow happening directly between people,
I think you'll see it grow really, really fast.
And if you have the right team that is long-term oriented,
then they're going to actually take that growth and translate it into something that's like
retained and valuable and ongoing.
So we've yet to have that happen in crypto. and translate it into something that's like retained and valuable and an ongoing uh creation
so we've yet to have that happen in crypto everything has been more or less some variation of
uh make a kind of token bet that is probably more defy and there are different layers of
wrapping that and so i think that that is that is my bet for 2025 is you probably have the first
one of those and then you're going to have a lot of people look at that model and go, oh, I can do that for X, right?
Like Uber for X, like you're going to see that get cloned in a lot of different ways.
Yeah.
No, I think, again, a lot of people have been waiting for it.
Regulatory-wise, you haven't been able to say it.
You haven't been able to promise utility.
You haven't been able to tie a token to the network effects
that I think has sucked every smart person I know in Web3 in here
because that is kind of how you scale faster.
The ability to co-own a media outlet, I think, again, I think our content is pretty good,
but I think it actually has helped us scale faster as well.
And yeah, I'm excited the same way, just to see Web3 use cases explode in 25.
And so congrats to you guys.
I've been loving all the changes, the experiment as it continues and everything else you guys are rolling out.
As I said, the engagement for some of our posts higher over there than what we're seeing on X anyways.
And I think it truly is a bit more needed now as some of the short-term decisions are now being made on X.
And so congrats to you guys with what you're building.
And can't thank you enough for coming on, man.
It was good to see you.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thank you.
Dan Romero there, the co-founder at Farcaster.
As we turn our attention back over to the markets right now, because it's been a tough day as we're seeing crypto in general under pressure over here.
Texas doesn't care because he doesn't have any of his money in crypto necessarily.
But I know a lot of people watching the show are not pleased with a 7% decline here,
maybe potentially a little bit of bottom action right now to see how that plays out.
I know there's a lot of panic. I know there's a lot of questions. So let's dig into some of that
right now on the live stream. As we digest what we heard from President Trump yesterday in the
Rose Garden as he announced a plan, somewhat of a dual plan, to institute 10% tariffs across the board, and then on top of it,
also adding on reciprocal tariffs as potentially you could see it as a negotiating tactic
to have some leverage over a lot of these countries as we move forward. So depending
on what happens in the
markets today, perhaps safe to say, perhaps not safe to say that we're out of the woods just quite
yet, at least when you look at maybe where things are trading. Of course, I think if you ask a lot
of smart people right now, seeing where we close, when traditional markets close, it's going to be
key. But watching the key numbers on both Ethereum and Bitcoin,
because we all know this happens, by the way.
I'm bringing up Bitcoin's price now.
We all know that these markets, generally,
we saw them sell off before the stock market sold off.
For whatever reason, I think crypto really is the leading price to watch
for when we're out of the woods.
And so holding 80 here, keep in mind, I didn't bring this up with Dan.
Keep in mind that Lululemon, you like yoga pants? Lululemon selling off harder today than Ethereum, which is
normally a much higher volatility asset. And so seeing, I mean, look, I understand why Lululemon
was selling off. Of course, you could say, hey, Zach, you're an idiot. Of course, Lululemon selling
off today. They make a lot of their shit in China or overseas. It's going to be more expensive to buy those yoga pants. RIP Lululemon yoga pants, or at least people who like them. And I would say, sure. But if you think about crypto just sitting there, I think to Dan's points that we were just talking about a little bit earlier. Very interesting to think about stable coins and the bill getting approved,
what that can do in terms of liquidity coming on.
It's a very weird time for crypto moving in the right direction in D.C.
Will markets move in the wrong direction?
And of course, if that continues, you don't have to be a genius to say,
hey, look, maybe crypto will be under pressure.
But to be here at 81, as markets suffer their worst day in two years,
I think that's pretty crazy to think about
from like a step back and think about a perspective.
And if you consider that maybe the stable coin bill,
which will come through relatively soon,
if you believe what we heard yesterday,
then you're going to have a huge boost in liquidity on chain
as that money, potentially billions, by the way, moves into stable coins.
And banks start to allow people to use stable coins in a way that they haven't been able to before.
So it's a really weird time.
And good luck to anybody who's going to be able to figure out what the hell happens next.
Because I think that is what we saw play out yesterday. You may have been distracted by somewhat of the misdirection around everyone watching Rose Garden and tariff talks.
But if you think about it, what was really on top of Trump's and his family's mind was what was going on in the House Financial Services Committee as the stablecoin bill was pushed through.
Committee as the stablecoin bill was pushed through. At least in that vote, it passed out
of committee, which basically means the stablecoin bill, whether it's in the Senate or the House,
has a green light to progress. And there were a few issues Democrats took with that.
And I just want to play some of the clips. I think we have Maxine Waters first to talk about,
because Democrats started with issues around this bill, mostly saying, look, Trump's got
his own stable coin now via World Liberty Financial, USD1. We've covered that. If you haven't dug into
the details, I think a lot more people should be talking about it. Whether you're pro-USD1 or
anti-USD1, not a lot of people talking about what might happen as Binance helps get that off the
ground and potentially what it could mean, by the way, for ETH and BNB.
That's a lot of money and a lot of support from Trump's family plowing it into both of those ecosystems.
And Democrats weren't so happy with the idea of a sitting president or his family.
Having any inside scoop on what might come from the rulemaking of this bill.
Just want to take a look at what they said to kick off the hearing. Here's Maxine Waters bringing up some conflicts of interest. Without this amendment,
other serious stablecoin issues would be put at great disadvantage to Trump's own companies. We must stop the crypto grift happening at the highest office of this company.
happening at the highest office of this company. And she meant, of course, country, I think,
when she said company. Can't speak for ranking member Waters. I'm not going to put words in
her mouth, but I'm pretty sure that's what she meant. Outside of that, though, we saw concerns
among Democrats go beyond just conflict of interest. It eventually got to a very interesting question that, again,
I don't think a lot of people have thought about, which is plugging a system like crypto,
which is so anti-bailout. I think about 2009, when Bitcoin's first block happened and was put
on the blockchain, Satoshi Nakamoto putting inside there a Times article talking about bailouts.
Chancellor on the brink of another bailout.
It's inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Which is to say, crypto in general has its roots in no bailouts allowed, bailouts bad.
And a lot of Democrats were raising that issue as well in this hearing saying,
look, if we're about to plug stable coins into the
traditional banking system, what's going to happen if one of these should DPEG like we saw with USDC
back in 23? What might happen there? And so a lot of questions from Democrats. Texas,
it's almost like I take your pick, not the one from Sam Liccardo who is talking about
conflict of interest. But then we saw Stephen Lynch, we saw Brad Sherman, so many
other people raising questions about, do we really want to introduce the idea of bailing
out stablecoins, if we need to again? I'll let you play whichever one you like. Take
a listen.
The chairman, when he was here, told us, if you don't want to use crypto or you don't
want to use stablecoin, don't do it. Well, that's fine until they use your taxpayer dollar
to bail out a stablecoin you chose not to invest in.
So what would it mean if this amendment is voted down?
It would be a symbol, a statement to the entire crypto industry.
Congress is ready to bail you out.
The Republicans voted to allow institutions to bail you out.
The Fed might bail you out.
The FDIC may bail you out.
And when Congress had its one vote against bailing out stablecoin. They said, bail them out.
And so, after all that debate, it still went through.
House Financial Services Committee passed this bill.
And now we're going to see kind of, I think, a straightforward vote that comes next between
whether it's the Senate or the House.
Stablecoins are a thing, and they're going to be a thing.
And the answer to that question, again, hopefully, doesn't need to be answered in terms of will the government bail out one of these issues. And I don't know what happens
if we ever get to that point. But as we've seen with stablecoins, and again, that's kind of where
coinage, where we first started was covering Tara's collapse. And I understand what a lot of Republicans push back on
in terms of like, look, this is what we're making this bill for,
requiring people to have cash reserves or treasuries
that are very liquid in a bank somewhere
that would prevent a lot of bank runs or panics
that we've seen play out with stablecoins before.
But as Democrats pointed out,
those rules were kind of being followed by USDC and still when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, ran into issues of the like anyways.
And so some of these questions aren't answered, but very exciting times in crypto regardless as we see this move forward.
Because as you can see, a lot of money is going to be flowing into these.
And so short term, probably a win. Longer term, some very interesting questions when it comes to which system will win out.
The bailout idea of when banks take risk.
Do you want the system to collapse?
Or the other idea of bailouts bad and where crypto comes from.
If you want to read more on this, as always, you can head to coinage.media to unpack all of our reporting.
If you haven't checked out our episode on USD1, highly recommend that.
And if you're not yet subscribed to the YouTube channel, definitely do that.
Go check out the full episode on stable coins and all of our other coverage.
And if you want to, you can co-own Coinage Media with me and all of our other members at coinage.media as well.
Thank you for tuning in.
I hope we get to do more of these together.
And thanks to Dan Romero from Farcaster for joining us on today's stream.
Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.
For Dan, for myself, for everybody here at Coinage, thank you again.
And we'll see you again soon.
