SociFi dream shattered? Farcaster pivots to focus on the wallet track

Author: zhou, ChainCatcher

Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero (dwr) recently announced that the platform will undergo a major strategic adjustment, officially abandoning the "social-first" path it has adhered to for the past 4.5 years, and instead embracing a growth model driven by a "wallet-centric" approach.

It is reported that Farcaster was initially positioned as a decentralized social network where developers could build innovative social networks. It is an open protocol that can support many clients, much like email. Users will always be able to freely move their social identities between applications, and developers will always be free to build applications with new features on the network.

Dan Romero stated that under the social-first strategy, the platform released a fully functional version of the protocol, which was sufficiently decentralized and allowed multiple independent teams to build and integrate on top of it. However, data has shown that despite tremendous effort, the social-first strategy ultimately proved unsustainable.

At the beginning of 2024, thanks to the Frames feature and the DEGEN airdrop, daily active users (DAU) soared from around 2,000 to 100,000 (UTC+8), registered users surpassed 350,000, and the monthly growth rate once exceeded 400%.

But the peak lasted less than three months. Starting from September 2024, the data plummeted: DAU fell back to around 60,000 (UTC+8), monthly active users dropped by 40% month-on-month, and new daily user registrations plunged from a peak of 15,000 (UTC+8) to just a few hundred.

Entering 2025, the situation continued to deteriorate, with daily active users on the social side dropping by nearly 40% again, until the USDC deposit 10% reward campaign launched in October managed to pull overall daily active users back to the 50,000 (UTC+8) to 60,000 (UTC+8) range through wallet functionality.

At the same time, protocol revenue also plummeted: by October 2025, monthly revenue had dropped to about $10,000 (UTC+8), the lowest level in four months, down about 99% from its peak.

Faced with this harsh reality, Dan Romero admitted that they had never been able to find a sustainable growth mechanism for a Twitter-like social network.

Therefore, Farcaster's transformation this time is a pragmatic choice, no longer pursuing a purely social narrative, but instead betting resources on the rapidly growing wallet functionality: first use the tool (wallet), then build the network (protocol).

The team observed that the wallet feature launched in the App earlier this year expanded rapidly and was the closest module to product-market fit in their five years. The new user flow has been redesigned: user registration - wallet top-up - wallet usage, with wallet top-up and tool usage as activation points.

Dan Romero summarized that every new, retained wallet user is a new user of the protocol. As users have commented, SocialFi is a combination of social and finance, and integrating the wallet is the real beginning.

At the product level, the core goal of Farcaster's official app Warpcast has shifted to building an excellent wallet, with a focus on expanding the intersection between wallet and social. DWR believes that adding a wallet to a social network is easier than adding a social network to a wallet. This integration is achieved through Farcaster Mini App, a lightweight Web application based on the Farcaster protocol that can be seamlessly integrated into clients such as Warpcast.

At the same time, Farcaster is also actively deploying financial infrastructure:

• Asset issuance: By acquiring the token issuance platform Clanker, Farcaster has equipped its wallet-centric strategy with asset issuance capabilities and now holds 1.8% of the total supply of Clanker.
• Financial incentives: In October, a USDC deposit campaign was launched offering an extra 10% reward, directly accelerating the conversion of users into on-chain asset holders through financial incentives.

On the content side, Frames (interactive mini-apps) are the presentation form of Mini App in the information feed and are the key hub for realizing the "content is transaction" mechanism. Users can directly complete minting, trading, payments, and other financial actions within the feed, with each interaction directly driving the use of the built-in wallet. This model transforms Farcaster from a venue for information consumption to a venue for value transfer, accelerating the financialization of the ecosystem.

Of course, this strategic transformation is built on Farcaster's strong resource base and elite team background. The platform has attracted top institutions such as Paradigm, a16z, and Union Square Ventures, raising $150 million in its Series A round in 2024 at a valuation of $1 billion. As for the team, co-founders Dan Romero (former VP of Operations at Coinbase), Varun Srinivasan, and developer ecosystem lead Linda Xie (early Coinbase employee), all have strong Coinbase backgrounds, and Coinbase Ventures also participated in Farcaster's early seed round.

However, this transformation has also been accompanied by industry skepticism regarding "maximal decentralization." Well-known crypto researcher CM believes that Farcaster's shift to a wallet route and abandonment of the social-first strategy means the last dream of SocialFi has ended, and the entire Crypto space seems to have returned to the 2017 ICO era, where "everything revolves around trading and issuance."

Other comments have pointed out that Farcaster's early products suffered from low usability and slow login on Android systems, and criticized its pragmatic decisions on decentralization and user experience, which did not please decentralization maximalists.

In his post, Dan Romero made it clear that this does not mean the protocol has become a casino. The Farcaster protocol is still an open system, and developers are free to choose the parts they find most useful. The official app (Warpcast) has simply chosen to focus on the "intersection of wallet and social," while other clients such as Uno, Recaster, and Cura are taking different approaches.

In other words, if users do not agree with this direction, they can choose to use other clients, build their own clients, or consider another social network. CM also added that, in theory, it is possible to build other clients, but estimates that few people would attempt it at this point.

In addition, some comments have pointed out that the current wallet track is already highly competitive, with Base App and others actively developing, so Farcaster still faces certain challenges. At the same time, the winner in the wallet track must correctly answer one question: what wallet features do people really want? Piling on features may lead to feature bloat, ultimately making the wallet unwieldy.

Overall, Farcaster's transformation is driven by brutal market data and pragmatic execution. It reveals the essence of the current SociFi track and sets a key tone: pure Web3 social may be difficult to succeed, and it is necessary to use high-value, high-frequency financial tools as the entry point, with content-driven financialization mechanisms as the core of network stickiness and value accumulation.