The well-known social project Facaster is shifting its focus

Recently, Dan Romero, the co-founder of the well-known social project Farcaster, announced a major strategic shift for the project, officially abandoning the social application that has been promoted for over four years and fully transitioning to a "wallet-driven" growth model—simply put, focusing on wallet promotion to attract users into its social ecosystem.

I have mentioned this project in previous articles, and I have registered as a user myself, maintaining an ongoing interest in it.

For a long time, it has been a heavily participated project among the core players of the BASE ecosystem. Many active players in the ecosystem enjoy posting or communicating within this application, which has also given rise to several popular meme coins within the BASE ecosystem. The project team even acquired the popular application Clanker not long ago.

The overall impression of the project is high-end and niche, but the core users exhibit extremely high stickiness.

People have always hoped that it could leverage this high stickiness to create a unique business model and scenarios for Web 3 social.

Because of this, the project has accumulated nearly $180 million in funding over the past few years, with investors including the renowned Paradigm, a16z crypto, and others.

However, now, after nearly five years of practice, the project has ultimately not reached the desired state and has to pivot.

Web 3 social has always been a popular field for various project teams to venture into. Before Farcaster, there were many once-popular Web 3 projects, starting with Steemit, followed by Mask Network, and then Friend.Tech…

But all of these projects have, without exception, become pioneers.

Now, in my view, Farcaster's pivot marks, to some extent, the endpoint of the existing Web 3 social model. This does not mean that Web 3 social has no future, but rather that the Web 3 social models we once imagined and currently envision may not be viable.

From a "hindsight" perspective, could it be that whenever it involves human interaction, whether through language or content, regardless of what new things Web 3 can bring, it ultimately revolves around a fundamental characteristic: social interaction must come down to communication between people and the social circles formed by individuals.

And as long as it comes down to communication between people and the social circles formed by individuals, it cannot shake the barriers that have already been established by current Web 2 applications.

Or is it that the various means provided by Web 3 find it difficult to pull people out of the relationship networks already formed by Web 2 applications and reconstruct them in some Web 3 application?

As for Farcaster's so-called pivot—whether leveraging wallets to drive social interaction can achieve the expected results, it may still be too early to draw conclusions:

First, there are already too many wallet applications;

Second, Farcaster's inherent "elite" and "small circle" genes do not quite align with the wallet application approach that requires wild growth and vigorous promotion.

So at least for now, it is not clear what makes it special.

Farcaster's development status is actually a microcosm of many projects in the current crypto ecosystem.

For these projects, if viewed purely from a personal preference perspective, as long as the risks are controllable, it doesn't matter how one participates; but from an investment perspective, the vast majority of projects require caution, caution, and more caution when participating.

This is also why I mentioned in a previous article that I haven't bought anything for at least six months; and why when users ask about a certain project in the comments, I either do not respond or my views are very conservative.

If you genuinely like the vision of a project and are willing to suffocate together for its dream, then go ahead; if you intend to invest real money and expect decent returns, then measure its intrinsic value based on real, grounded business models, profit revenues, and other tangible indicators.