Farcaster To Migrate From Ethereum To Optimism Superchain

Farcaster, an Ethereum-based social media graph, plans to migrate onto Optimism, a leading Layer 2 network.

Dan Romero, Farcaster’s co-founder and CEO, noted that many of its “most active users and developers” are currently building on Optimism or another network using Optimism’s OP Stack, such as Base or Zora.

“We’re planning to migrate the Farcaster identity and storage contracts to OP Mainnet in the coming weeks,” Romero added. “After that, we plan to enable permissionless sign-ups.”

With Ethereum’s Layer 2s now processing five times as many transactions per second (TPS) as the mainnet, many projects in the Ethereum ecosystem are pivoting the focus of their operations onto L2.

The growth of Ethereum’s scaling ecosystem also promises to unlock new applications requiring high transaction throughput and low fees, including decentralized social media protocols. Lens, the social media protocol from Aave, is hosted on a bespoke Layer 3 appchain.

friend.tech Reignites Interest In SocialFi

Web3 is buzzing about social dApps following the meteoric rise of friend.tech, an app allowing users to speculate on ‘keys’ associated with public Twitter profiles.

Just ten days after its launch, friend.tech ranked as the top dApp by fee volume on Aug. 21, but has since receded to third behind Lido and Uniswap, according to DeFi Llama. On Aug. 18, Friend Tech revealed it had received seed funding from Paradigm, a top venture capital firm active in the web3 sector.

Farcaster closed a $30M funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz last July.

Base Bolsters Optimism’s ‘Superchain’

Analysts also attribute the emergence of Base, Coinbase’s OP Stack-based Layer 2, as the top Layer 2 by transaction throughput to friend.tech’s surging user base. The network hosted 69,000 active users over the past day, according to Token Terminal.

More than 109,000 unique wallets have traded on friend.tech, according to Dune Analytics.

Base’s success serves as a boon to Optimism’s Superchain roadmap, which outlines a unified ecosystem of symbiotic Layer 2s leveraging its open-source OP Stack. Coinbase serves as a core developer for OP Stack and endorses Optimism’s vision for the Superchain.