Today I will briefly talk about the Farcaster protocol. Maybe many people don’t quite understand Farcaster, and don’t understand the relationship between#Warpcastand #Farcaster, and are confused when using the APP.
Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol, and the protocol architecture consists of two parts: on-chain and off-chain. The account system exists on the Op chain, while the content sent by users, comments, likes, follow-up relationships, etc. are stored in a P2P network called Hubs off-chain. This is developed by Farcaster, and anyone can be a node of Hubs to store the content in the protocol.
Taking my account as an example, the account has a FID which is unique and immutable, and an Fname which can be changed. Fname is parsed through ENS configuration.
If ordinary users want to send and view content, they need to use a client to read the content of Hubs. Warpcast is an officially released client, which can use the Farcaster protocol. However, anyone can make a client and read all the content of Hubs. In fact, there are many clients now. The former Mirror team just announced that it has raised 10 million yuan to develop a new Farcaster client called Kiosk.
Of course, each client has free space, it can decide whether to display certain content, and it may also have its own unique functions. Most clients will be centrally operated. Take WarpCast as an example, its Warps are centrally issued points, 100 can be purchased for 1 US dollar, and are used to pay for the links that require payment.
The reason why payment is involved is that the Farcaster network is not free to use. If you have created an account, you will know that you need to pay for it. You need to pay to store content on the Farcaster network, and each account also pre-leases a storage unit. The current price of a storage unit is $7 per year. Posting content, liking and other interactions, storing personal homepage content, and authenticating apps all require storage units. According to the official document, the storage capacity of each storage unit is as shown in the figure. If it exceeds the capacity and you do not continue to pay for the lease, the old content will be automatically cleared one by one after the 30-day waiting period, so that your content will disappear from the network.
Some people may think that the cost of using it is too high and not conducive to large-scale promotion. However, I think this is not a problem. It is certain that the protocol layer needs to pay because the network maintenance has costs. As it gradually matures, the application layer can bear this cost for users. Just like the Web2 platform users can use it for free, it is not because there is no cost, but because the platform itself bears various costs such as servers and bandwidth, and then earns money from users in other ways.
Well, the above is a preliminary introduction to the Farcaster protocol. If you want to experience it, you are welcome to download Warpcast and register an account through my link: https://warpcast.com/~/invite-page/320787?id=2efd629f. If you want to know more about the ecosystem, you can follow my subsequent content.