Farcaster Launches Permissionless Onboarding

Farcaster, the Optimism-based decentralized social media protocol, opened its doors to permissionless onboarding.

Dan Romero, the co-founder of Farcaster, announced the news on Oct. 11 via tweet, declaring that the platform is now open to all users.

“We’re excited to announce that our social network, Farcaster, is 100% permissionless,” Romero said. “Anyone with an internet connection and some Ether can sign up and use the network.”

Romero added that Warpcast, a Farcaster client, also facilitates onboarding for users who do not hold ETH.

Farcaster announced it would migrate from the Ethereum mainnet to Optimism in August. Users can choose to utilize any client of their choice, while devs have full access to the platform’s data and APIs. Farcaster charges an annual fee of $5 for users to access the platform.

Anthony Sassano, host of The Daily Gwei podcast, speculated that Farcaster’s success will be determined by whether it becomes overrun with bots.

“I'm very very curious to see what Farcaster looks like in six months,” Sassano said. “Is it overrun by bots? Is it overrun by spam? What does the content moderation look like? These social platforms live or die based on that.”

The news comes amid the impressive rise of the web3 SocialFi sector, with the social trading platform, Friend Tech, leading the charge in August. Friend Tech quickly emerged as a top web3 protocol by fee revenue, recently enjoying beating out Uniswap with seven figures daily.

On Oct 10, Lens, the decentralized social graph from Aave, announced it would begin onboarding users at a faster rate ahead of its forthcoming v2 migration.