What makes a protocol successful?
I have been spending more time learning about and using Farcaster.
As a social media platform, it's brilliant in a couple of key ways.
It's future, however, is still unclear to me but I think there's much to learn about it from the protocol design perspective.
The first is that there's an amazing product on the protocol. It's illustrating what's possible, and providing a means of improving upon it.
The underlying protocol and it's "sufficiently decentralized" mode (Romero's words) is tackling the heart of the problem with more social media. It's pragmatism mixed with idealism -- truly an origin of what makes the world better (to the degree one believes social media can have a positive place in the world).
But it is the introduction of frames which I think has taken it to another level.
Frames, despite its humble origins of providing simple CTA's for developers, potentially exposes for developers another channel to embed their own micro-product into another product and do so permissionlessly.
This is a characteristic that I think will become more seamless and common. I'm trying to think of ways to incorporate this in the future.
A semi-similar idea, one which I had a while back when working on CounterParty, occurred at ethLondon's Pragma in 2024. I had purchased the NFT pass, and the pass had additional "benefits" permissionlessly added to it.
I really do think this is going to be the future, definitely for b2c.
But we've already seen the potential of this with applications having their own marketplace.
There are start-ups which provide this marketplace; the protocol will make it more seamless and likely permissionless.
The winner should be the protocol which enables this ability to bootstrap whole networks very quickly by virtual of its own network effects.
- Successful product built on top of it
- Core design met the key pain - counterparty risk/rug pull by social media platforms
- Headless/embedding of other developer services permissionlessly