Farcaster, Warpcast and $DEGEN. A sufficiently decentralized social network.

By The Very Confused Martin Babalor | Crypto Gigs | Airdrops | Earners | 26 Mar 2024

I recently joined Warpcast completing a quest on Coinbase wallet. The reward I received covered completely the signup costs of joining Warpcast, so I decided to give it a try.
If you don't know what Coinbase Wallet quests are, you should probably take a look. In the last weeks, I was able to onboard different projects for free and earn a few tokens just to try them. These quests are a sort of evolution of traditional "Earn and Learn" campaigns into a more "Try and earn".
Thanks to these quests, I recently minted the address of a very famous museum in Italy on Propykeys. Hopefully, it will be worth something one day.

Warpcast is a mobile app that is a mobile client for Farcaster, a "sufficiently decentralized social network".
But what does sufficiently decentralized mean?

Farcaster

Farcaster protocol is a decentralized framework built on Optimism, one of the most popular L2 solution. It is completely open-source, meaning that everyone is able to build applications and economic systems on top of it. The goal, as with everything that’s decentralized, is to ensure that users have full control of their data and targets.
Farcaster was co-founded back in 2020 by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, two former Coinbase employees.

Farcaster is one of the most successful projects in reaching the goal of developing a web3 social media able to merge the peculiarities of traditional social networks with the potential of blockchain technology. You can easily imagine it as a decentralized Twitter enhanced by blockchain tools like Frames, a sort of app builder inside Farcaster.

Warpcast gives users the possibility, through something called Frames, to interact with various applications without leaving the platform. This innovation, together with elements taken from traditional social networks such as liking, writing posts (called "casts") and sharing (recasts), is making Warpcast the enhanced version of traditional social networks.

Farcaster community is full of developers (even Vitalik Buterin has an account on the platform), creators, NFT holders and crypto enthusiasts. Joining Warpcast is not free (currently signing in costs something like 5$) and this is working like a charm against bots and spammers.

The project is very early, with just 20k users active on the platform, but quickly growing. (https://cointelegraph.com/news/farcaster-daily-active-users-warpcast-frames). You can track Farcaster global activity here: https://farcaster.network/

$DEGEN

Farcaster and Warpcast are also having success in creating their own tokenomics, thanks to Base token $DEGEN.
Degen is one of the most followed channels on the platform, and its token, $DEGEN, was launched on Base network, currently counting over 25,000 holders and a market capitalization of over 44 million dollars.
Users can use $DEGEN to tip other users and participate in different Airdrops (I believe Season 2 is currently running). You can view statistics related to your account by connecting to degen.tips. Consider that, if you are new users, before viewing your data and finding out how many $DEGEN you can tip per day, you will have to make 3 casts in the Farcaster channel and wait at least 48 hours after creating the account.