yyc trader & Denis Omelchenko
December 08, 2025

gm Defiers!

Today’s big story:

After nearly five years and $180m in funding, Farcaster is giving up on its social network ambitions.

In other news:

Bitcoin holds $90K as Saylor buys another $960 million
SEC drops Biden-era probe into Ondo Finance
HumidiFi to launch new token after presale gets botted
BMIC Paves the Way for Crypto’s Quantum Computing Revolution [SPONSORED]

Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.

Filecoin Onchain Cloud is live! Verifiable and programmable storage, fast retrievals, and onchain payments so builders can run real workloads without Big Cloud lock-in. Let's open the cloud: Filecoin.Cloud

We’re back! Here’s what you need to know in web3 today

📈 Markets in the Past 24 Hours

TICKER	VALUE	24H
Bitcoin	$91,114	0.24 %
Ethereum	$3,145.82	0.56 %
XRP	$2.08	0.76 %
BNB	$901.89	-0.04 %
Solana	$134.05	-0.85 %

Today’s Big Story

Farcaster Abandons Social Strategy

Farcaster’s five-year run as a social-network-centric blockchain project appears to be coming to an end after co-founder Dan Romero said in a series of posts that the team failed to find a “sustainable growth mechanic for the Twitter-like social network.”

In a Farcaster post on Sunday, Dec. 7, Romero wrote that the team “tried social-first” for 4.5 years but “it didn’t work for us,” adding that “wallet has been growing so we’re doubling down on that direction.”

There were already clear signals that Farcaster was moving away from its original model. In late October, the project acquired Clanker, an AI-driven token launchpad on Base, and began integrating it more deeply into the app.

“Earlier this year, we launched a wallet in our app. It has scaled quickly, and we think it's the closest we've been to product-market fit in five years,” Romero wrote in another Farcaster post. Now, the logic, according to Romero, follows a simple pattern:

“[...] every user who signs up, funds, and starts using the wallet is also on the protocol. The more people that find the wallet useful, the more people using the protocol.”

And because the team already built a functioning social layer, they now plan to add social features to the wallet rather than continue trying to bolt a wallet onto a stagnating timeline.

Farcaster isn’t alone in this redirection. Projects like Steemit and BitClout saw similar outcomes. They also attempted to bootstrap communities with token incentives, often spiking early but still failing to sustain meaningful social engagement.

Farcaster doesn’t abandon its social ambitions. At least not yet. Romero argued that the “come for the tool, stay for the network” motto is the strategy most likely to grow the protocol, even if that means attracting users who care about on-chain tools first and social feeds second.

Whether that tradeoff works will determine what Farcaster becomes in its next chapter.

Denis, staff reporter at The Defiant

Forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe for daily insights and curated news from The Defiant team, Monday-Saturday. It’s free.

Subscribe to Defiant Daily

🎬WATCH

More Than Wrappers | RWAs on Avalanche | Ecosystems, Ep. 3

In our third episode of the Avalanche Ecosystems mini-series, we dive into one of the most important trends in crypto: tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs). From land records to treasuries, private credit, and publicly traded equities, Avalanche is enabling institutions to not just issue onchain wrappers, but to create the real thing. It's tokenization the right way.

With interviews from Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo and Morgan Krupetsky (Ava Labs), Dan Silverman (Balcony), Kevin Chan (Grove) and Gabriel Otte (Dinari), we explore how Avalanche’s architecture is powering a new wave of RWAs across finance, government infrastructure, and consumer applications.

Watch the mini doc here:

This content is part of a media partnership between The Defiant and Ava Labs

Top News in the Past 24 Hours

Bitcoin Hovers Around $90,000 as Saylor Reveals $960 Million Buy BTC climbed as high as $92,000 earlier in the day after Michael Saylor’s Strategy revealed that it had purchased an additional 10,624 coins for nearly $963 million Why it matters: After a volatile November, Bitcoin is attempting to find support around $90,000.
ONDO Jumps as SEC Ends Biden-Era Probe The tokenization platform’s ONDO token jumped 7% on news that the SEC has ended its investigation without bringing any charges. Why it matters: Ondo, which focuses on bringing traditional assets onto public blockchains, is one of the sector’s most prominent players with nearly $2 billion in TVL.
HumidiFi to Launch New Token After Snipers Raid Presale Solana-based proprietary automated market maker (AMM) HumidiFi is abandoning its initial token sale and launching a new token after a bot farm sniped the entire presale supply in seconds. Why it matters: HumidiFi is the top DEX by volume on Solana.