Farcaster, Base and the future of decentralized social

Transcript

GM good morning welcome to the milroad show The Daily crypto show that's as thrilling as finding out your leftovers didn't expire yet I'm your host Jay Hamilton happy New Year everybody today is part two of a two-part series with Dan Romero now why do you want to listen to Dan Romero first of all he's employee number 20 from coinbase second of all he first bought Bitcoin in 2014 for $97 and now he is the co-founder of farcaster which is one of the leading decentralized social networks now if you don't know forecaster you don't use farcaster here's why you're gonna want to listen to this episode first we're going to talk about how foraster has become the frontier or the Leading Edge

of crypto it's one of the best places to get Alpha uh you know AI agents and how everyone's talking about AI agents now well if you were on foraster in September of last year you already knew about AI agents because they've been talking about for a while we're also going to talk about specifically what's happening on forecaster with AI agents it is so cool what is going on over there the experimentation and the way that they are using AI agents and tokens I I won't even get into it we're going to talk about the opportunities that exist on forecaster to capitalize to make money uh not just as an investor Dan really breaks down some incredible ways that you can use foraster uh to make profits and to make money and

they're we're talk about the relationship between bass and forcaster and so much more we talk about Elon we talk about Twitter we talk about so much in this episode you guys are going to absolutely love it before we jump in it's 2025 everybody and you know what in 2025 I want to have bigger and better guests on this show for you so that we guys we can give you guys the edge we can give you the alpha you need and you know how you can help with that hit the like button smash subscribe follow us on whatever Channel you're listening on it would be a huge help to us and will only help us get better people on the show and grow our show so that it can help you more before we jump in to hear from Dan we need to take a minute to hear

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of things when you were I mean a you could have stayed at coinbase and obvious rocket ship that you were on um but then you decided to to leave coinbase you I'm sure did fairly well there and you were pretty set up could have done a lot of things why decentralized social yeah so it's 2020 I think the thing i' had been thinking about for a long time even pre coinbase but but very much influenced by like working at coinbase seeing the you kind of growth of Bitcoin emergence of ethereum this idea of like protocols is it seemed wild that you know the the increased prominence of of Twitter in terms of

like to the discourse to how how how how our country and and frankly the the whole world Works to have it be controlled by a small group of people in San Francisco who may or may not have the same Politics as you or you know may or may not have your countries if if you're a different country than the US interests in mind kind of seems relative to the rest of the internet which like yes the US kind of has like a founding role and the Commerce Department technically controls a bunch of stuff in DNS but overall the internet feels pretty Sovereign M much more so than centralized social media and so I I I thought it was like kind of like okay if I believe one of the things I believe

is like crypto is going to slowly just like eat everything in software everything will kind of merge with crypto I think AI is probably similar with that at this point but crypto is like water it's just going to seep itself into everything then it's it's clear to me that like on a 10-year Horizon from 2020 to 2030 decentralized social networks are going to be a thing like just if if you believe that thesis so some of those you could you could argue on that those two premises alone and maybe you disagree but those are the two things they went in and so from that standpoint I think I was pretty bullish and and so was my co-founder verun on this idea that like starting work on a decentralized social network protocol also betting on the improvements and like the underlying imp

infastructure for crypto over a long period of time was was a good bet and so I think that that four years in is definitely been proven true I think what's been different is I didn't expect Elon to go and buy Twitter so I think that there was a bit of a a bet on you're competing as a stagnant Twitter versus now Twitter is maybe a bit more chaotic so there's like progress happening but like there are a lot of people are upset about it so that's it's been a big variable change for us and so I think if you take the macro like we are moving to decentralized protocol based social in the sense that threads which is the Facebook uh kind of competitor to Twitter is Loosely

integrated with what they call the fediverse which is decentralized it's like mdon that's 275 million people use it every month and then Blue Sky obviously I think is a more concentrated new BET in terms of a protocol and and they've done quite well are people using Blue Sky pardon are people using Blue Sky yeah yeah I mean there there's like you know 25 million users on their protocol I I think what what what's interesting though is like threads and blue sky have really benefited from the anti- Elon like Twitter and so one thing for crypto people is like for the most part they haven't left because they're just like okay X works for me and that's where the crypto audience is and yeah the Alo likes crypto so

I'm people they're seeing the cryp content that they want and then they're fine and so that that that group actually has not moved and so I think a lot about this for farcaster because like we really haven't benefited much from the anti- Elon because crypto people actually are just not in like that is not a driver for them and so I think what where it's taken us with with foraster and the thing that you know still very much interested in building going back to why I decided to work on in 2020 is we fundamentally believe like protocol based social networks like that is going to continue to be a trend and grow and then I think our adjustment to that is like we're building in crypto so the the the opportunity for for

forecaster is to be the best crypto social network right and there is a little bit of Precedence for this in that I'm dating myself but when I first started a coinbase there was no crypto Twitter it was crypto Reddit right and it's like Bitcoin talk was a forum there's our Bitcoin our ethereum and and so basic basically if you had a cryptocurrency you had a like a subreddit and over the last 10 years it's it's very much migrated to a combination of Twitter Telegram and Discord and our belief is none of those are protocols by the way telegram probably is like the closest to it but it's still run by one company and so I think like if you fast forward over

the next five to 10 years I I genuinely believe crypto social networks will be built on crypto rails will be tightly coupled and you're already starting to see some of this with telegram with like their wallet their mini apppp ecosystem ton but I think um it's just like obvious that like crypto will have its own set of like kind of social experiences that are much more tightly coupled and I think you might get a little bit of it from the the big incumbents but they changed their priorities so often so it's like Facebook was interested in doing this they didn't ship it they did some nft stuff with Instagram they've removed that Twitter had the you know your pfp and nft during 2021 they've since removed it so the

idea that like kind of like it can come and go as a fad versus like a new foundation for these new types of experiences that's basically what we're building with ourter yeah there certainly there certainly feels like an inevitability to decentralize social for for so many reasons let's fast forward to today so today what foraster or or warp cast has become is sort of like the frontier of crypto it's like really like if you want the alpha that's a great place to go because like and the best example for me is AI all of a sudden and and I don't mean AI broadly I mean AI crypto and AI agents if you were on forecaster months ago you were already

well aware of AI and AI agents and that narrative whereas if you're on crypto Twitter you might not have been aware of it and you might have you might have only caught up to it in the last few weeks when all of a sudden everyone else caught up to it what what has made forecasters sort of like and is that the way you see it as how do you see it I guess would be a good question when you compare it to Twitter or to threads is that is that the Focus right now to be that edge and is that what it's becoming yeah so we we've been pretty explic in our like go to market over the last four years is like we've grown slower but been really deliberate in going after developers and so I think one criticism early on with forer is like oh it's too

techy it's too developer Centric like this isn't the same as crypto Twitter but that's starting to pay off for us where one there are plenty of other non-developers on the platform you know kind on The Social Network today so like you you get a much more varied mix of content but because you have such a core of developers they're the ones who can actually like tinker and build these new experiences and because forecaster one way to think about Twitter is like when Twitter was early on Twitter had really open apis so like people did a bunch of experimentation and cool stuff on top of Twitter for the last 10 years it's gotten more and more closed and Elon basically is like totally locked it down yeah there are some instances where you can go do this stuff and a lot of the AI agents on on Twitter actually they don't

even use the official like paid API because that's basically the only way you can get on Twitter they like reversed engineer it so they're kind of like a little bit of a house of cards like should should uh you know Elon wake up one day and say hey no more no more AI Agents from these Crypt Bros on far on Twitter Bo they all get deleted so the the contrast with forecaster is like forecaster is uh completely programmable everything you can do on forecaster you can program so it's not every person obviously is going to do that but what's cool is like you just get a lot more weird experimentation because no one has to ask for permission they can just like go do something and so we call them Legos right it's like people can like pull all these Legos off the shelf like immediately put them

together and so we've had people build you know just like your classic AI agent that like can respond to you and do whatever and then someone was like well why don't I just build an AI agent that can deploy tokens on base so that someone built that and then naturally you started having the like AI agent that you could just like talk to people would prompt it to be like hey why don't you create a token from this other AI like so you have like these like two AI agents talking about like deploying tokens which then can like get shared right in the feed and then like you have a link and you can go trade it so it's like weird experimentation and who knows where it kind of goes like another example of this is like someone just took one of these random coins that had

been deployed in the comments on foraster and then they basically were like I'm gonna build an entire app separate from this but if you own a certain balance of this coin then you can actually go use the app and the app is basically like um like an anonymous posting app it's called a non-cast and so the idea is if you have certain number of tokens you can actually post using like kind of like gigabrain math ZK zero knowledge like you don't need to understand that you just go to this website you connect your wallet and it's like great you your able to post you post and it's like cryptographically proven that no one can dox you and you're able to post to this account that has an increasing number of followers and then what they did is they've gotten more popular is they actually created a

Twitter account and so if you have a sufficient balance of tokens which naturally if more people want to use this like the price of those tokens will go up because people will buy those tokens but if you have a cision balance of tokens you actually can now post anonymously on Twitter to the account but that account has it's gained followers like now you can overly guy the biggest people in crypto and they're more likely to see you because it's like you know it's an account it's got a yellow check so they're paying you know thousand dolls a month so so it's like if you're actually like looking to like reply guy or like get yourself out there like maybe using a non-cast is like the way to go but but my point is is that like all of these pieces are completely composable with one another and it just

like the speed of innovation because we focused on devs for a really long time is really starting to pick up and I think Our Hope in 2025 is like by having this set of kind of like developer Legos you just get more and more weird interesting Alpha oriented experiments and and really be at the edge of what's happening in crypto actually the the um uh the founder sha makes magic of of Eliza which is like the big AI framework that's powering a lot of the um AI bots on X which obviously most of them have coins associated with it he he tweeted you know a couple weeks ago like basically forecaster is like The Cutting Edge of this stuff and it's like yes it's smaller today than x but like

people coming up with the experiments that are going to like pop up on your X feed a few weeks later they're doing that on forecaster increasingly right yeah I I I I want to keep going with a few more questions this but first I just need to ask you you probably you obviously understand how a lot of these algorithms work and I don't I don't know if you know the you obviously are spec I'm going to ask you to speculate a little bit here but is is is e on pushing down crypto content is he it feels like I don't know it feels like he is from my perspective so I actually do a decent amount of like testing of different things because primarily where I get a lot of top of funnel is like I have an account with 115,000 followers on X Twitter and when

I share stuff that kind of goes viral you know I can get a thousand likes and like 100,000 views but I think words get like definitely deranked because like there are certain words like I actually try to avoid using forecaster now because I wonder if that's like been added again there's no way to prove it but like the the less information I post that like have like keywords like we have this thing called frames or like I I just try to avoid those words because I feel like when I'm putting those same same C some same tweet like I'll get an insane amount of Engagement but the total number of views will be like 10,000 whereas if I just like put a video like like a recording of the like forecaster like an app in the forecaster

ecosystem and it's like a a 60-second video recording and like minimal text it will get like an insane amount of views because a it's like there's no like keyword ability to check and they actually reward you for time spent so there's like a whole meta now I think like links for sure kill your distribution so you should never ever put a link in your if you want to maximize Distribution on Twitter the best thing you can do is either put an image or video video actually even more so that's why you see so many in your feed and so if you have a message you want to get out to people you should do a video right like this podcast like putting even a link in the second tweet like actually hurts it versus like actually just putting the full podcast up and then being like hey subscribe on

you know whatever platform you want to subscribe on or you do Clips like you know one minute Clips like you're going to get way more overall engagement in the algorithm and so I think like that's another thing that we're really focused on with farcaster is is we love links you put a link in a cast it's like our version of a tweet we don't penalize it like because the whole goal is like you've built up distribution you should be able to actually it's it's crazy to me right like you should be able to put a link to the milk Road podcast right in your on your Twitter feed for people who opted to see you they should be able to see that and instead the algorithm is like nope like we don't want you leaving the app which I understand the rationale behind that but I think it's like it's a

it's a you know kind of like short shortterm benefit to like juicing numbers that long-term hurts it and I I actually think a lot of like the growth that you've seen fur threads and blue sky a lot of those people were journalists and why do journalists want to leave yeah the politics angle but more importantly they live and die by their Distribution on their links they want people reading their stuff so if you kill distribution for links like you're just going to have people naturally want to use other things and so I think like again an opportunity for forecaster especially as it relates to if you're building something in crypto if you have a mint you have some new new asset that you've launched on one of these token launchers on any of them you there's no good way for you able to show it and I can almost promise you if you

have like ca with like contract address that's also probably been identified at a certain point of like oh this is associated with and to be fair it's the spammers that actually hurt a lot of this right it's like the classic like Elon was getting so much crypto spam replying to him I'm sure that they just said hey like scorched earth like let's go hurt this stuff but then that hurts anyone in crypto that actually legitimately wants to share something of importance yeah it's a great Point what's the relationship between Bas and forecaster yeah so it's funny like people assume we're on base but foraster actually from like a a technical implementation we actually tried to keep it as offchain as possible and the reason we did that is we just wanted

like the best ux and make it really fast now I actually think like l2s have gotten a lot better credit to Jesse at Bas like they've made it a lot cheaper but like the way we've approached it is foraster is mostly offchain and we have our own like kind of like magical way of doing that with crypto to make it all work but naturally what a lot of people are talking about on forecaster is stuff that they are doing on CH and the kind of thing that Jesse realized and and I've known Jesse for a really long time because I worked with my coinbase but he had been on farcaster pretty early on kind of paying attention and and as like we started to kind of put some of those developer Legos into place especially ones that helped Drive activity on chain

I think Jesse identified that early and jumped on it and and basically was like Hey if you're building something in the forecaster ecosystem you're building that that that kind of like a AI agent that deploys tokens like we're building that an anonymous posting thing I want you to do that on base and like building out the tooling and making that really easy basically developers have done that and so like all of those interesting experiments that have happened on farcast over the last like call it year that are on chain are all on base and that's like just like the hustle from the bass team to actually make it happen so it wasn't like we force you to do it the only thing that works on base it's like they actually earned all of the usage just by virtue of like being no to the grindstone which I I think anyone

probably listening this podcast that follows Jesse gets it it's like he's constantly out there on Twitter he's on there on farcas or like you know constantly just trying to support people building on chain and like making sure that they do it on base I think the only other ecosystem that's even coming close to that is salana right and so the reason people are building on salana base is because there are people out there hustling for that that uh you know kind of like to support the builders and the builders when they feel supported that's where they're going to go launch yeah yeah it's very interesting to see to know that it wasn't it's not an official relationship or anything like that it's just that that that Bas cares about farcaster knows that that's where a lot of the builders are and where a lot of the opportunity is and so

they're just present there and by be present there then all of these experiments are now happening on Bas which is a probably a big reason why because there's such a connection between AI agents in farcaster and there's now such a connection between AI agents and base that seems to be where most of the AI agents are and look it's all just happening because Bas is in that in that playing field and in that ecosystem should invest I would say there were plenty on Sal I don't want don't want the like mad on Twitter to direct me so I say like a lot on salana but would say the reason base is growing in that regard is it kind of that that symbiotic relationship between there a lot of builders on forecaster Bas is positioned it really itself really well

as like kind of being the default place to do something on chain and that starts to build kind of this like compounding effect where well other people are on base so like I'm gonna build on based I want to ask you a question that uh um I've been trying to think about is do AI agents need tokens need is probably no but is it a natural extension of what AI agents are going to do like is this just speculative or is there actually like a utility and a reason for them to have tokens well there's like a little bit more philosophical it's like do you think AI agents should be able to economically transact or or do you think that that's goingon to be it seems PL

right like if you could invent every use case right now obviously like you would know the answer but it seems possible that like AIS are going to interact with other AIS and there's going to be some economic transfer that will happen for a variety of different use cases okay so in that case the you know the the crypto skeptic would say well we already have tokenize credit cards like they can go do that and I would quickly go back to you and say or that person and say well the laws don't allow you to give a tokenized credit card to a an AI agent because the tokenized credit card is a credit card opened up in the name of an individual last time I checked I don't think you can open up like you

can't literally get a bank account for an AI it's not K probably can't I I should I always careful because then someone's gonna find something I don't think you can open up a bank account for your dog but but maybe but the point is is that at least the current set of laws AI agents can't get a bank account and and like they're not people they don't have a passport there's no social security number and so we will that get solved over time and like will strike and like other providers like allow you to do this stuff and for a bunch of cases it doesn't matter that the AI agent doesn't natively have its own because it's fine it can be like an extension of a human sure but there's a whole variety of use cases on the internet where it's like I'm literally just like booting up some code like the

code doesn't and and the beauty of blockchains is like you can run code increasingly sophisticated code autonomously once you've deployed it in the smart contract forever right and so if you were to somehow encapsulate code that you know interacts with an a agent or even Wilder like which I'm sure someone will figure out at some point you're able to stick some AI agent into a blockchain that literally forever will be able to run and the way to get it to run is you actually have to pay it like and now they are getting paid to you like that version of the world for sure will exist and I can promise you those those AI agents are not going to be getting a credit card you know they're just going

to just gonna have a crypto wallet like that that it's that is the good developer Experience One command line Click Boom you can run it yeah and I can only imagine the amount of use cases that you must be thinking about or be excited about when you just think about not even AI agents just what's the impact of having social media with a wallet being your account versus just an email being your account you know and this is where forecaster is so powerful it's not just an app it's a protocol and I'm curious to know what what other apps are being built on forecast or what's being built in the ecosystem that you're

excited about for 2025 yes so I mentioned the the like whole onchain agent token deploying so you've heard of pump fun there are probably a dozen different token deploying projects on farcaster now and they're all in in ating different uis different bonding curves different you know schemes um and so I think that like that that will continue to be at whole area of innovation and it's easy to dismiss the whole thing but the reality is like part of crypto is like people are looking for you know things to to make bets on and like if you have a massive number of tokens that are being collectively created across a variety of

different apps it offers those opportunities for people to to find that Alpha and make those bets right it's like classic crypto use case that's existed the entire time I've been in the industry the anonymous posting app there's a whole like kind of a class of those as well I think that there's actually a lot of interesting ways to go there where you could imagine you know you could find like a defined set of people so the hypothetical example um is imagine if you could get every single Cong US Congress person some crypto wallet and then they could all cryptographically post to something as an anonymous person so you'd know it's like okay the only people who have access to this are these 535 Congress people but like you don't know which one and actually there's no way to dox them

or like whatever and and and so I think that like that whole area like there's a lot of interesting Innovation that can happen and I think a lot of that stuff is happening on farcaster we have like a bunch of other apps that are being built in the ecosystem which I think are a little bit more akin to just like your traditional social you know media so so things that feel more like Instagram things that you know there's like a version of like forecaster stories someone's permissionless built we have like basically power user clients so like clients that are really focused for people on trading and like discovering Alpha and so there's like a pro client for farcaster called supercast they rebranded to Super but that that is like

a a client for people who are like you're getting airdrops like you're being able to kind of like see the different coins that are being traded so so that's a whole class of applications that are like very focused on trading there's a chat app that like integrates with forecaster called friends that like basically you think was like telegram like group chat but then every time someone trades it like automatically creates like a buy sell ticker kind of like when someone leaves or joins the group so like that's built on top of the farcaster graph um there's an app called wait a second so let me just understand that so if I'm in this group chat and one of somebody in the group chat does a trade not not in the chat like nothing to do with chat they do the trade in their wallet and their wallet is

connected to the group chat it auto shares the trade with the group chat yeah and then and then and then uses a frame I'm guessing to give you a buy sell button directly in there yeah I think like in a simple like kind of like and it has a group chat like the price ticker actually like the chart that you can like call up like we'll actually show everyone's buy and sell with their little Avatar it's it's really cool it's friends. is the website but like that that app is is um like forecaster native there's another one called interface.

social which like you can kind of think of it's like a block Explorer which is a pretty technical tool but because it can just plug into the forecaster graph like you can literally just see every trade that people are making with like a like an a social layer and like the ability to just like one-click copy trade people so like the the the thing about the ecosystem is you can think of like farcaster as this like ever growing contact book like of like when you join a new messaging app or whatever it always is like upload your context so we can find out who else is on here but by using forecaster everyone has like kind of basically opted into this like public game similar to Twitter where it's like I follow you you follow me I interact with you whatever but that data is all

available to people uh again all public people know that it's public but as a result like you're able to just build these like really cool social experiences like if I sign up to some random app and you just showed me like some people in ethereum I didn't know I don't care but I sign up to this app and you show me that like 25 people interact with the most most like reasonable proxy for like friends or who I'm interested in you you can actually get some like pretty cool stuff and the nice thing is then you link your wallet once to foraster you don't have to link it to any of those other apps so when you sign up for friends you don't have to go relink your wallet it's just like you sign in boom like now it it knows like so all that social trading or same thing

with interface and so I think um that's our vision is like just provide this this kind of like Set of Legos for all of these developers as they're coming up with these like new and interesting experiences built with crypto so that like crypto like products get like crypto smart right like they they telegram which is like a product and now they have ton but like traditionally telegram is like oblivious to crypto like you can build a bot right to to trading but but the like UI is not like geared towards crypto or it's not native to crypto whereas like friends is a crypto native chat up and that that is improved as a result of like forecaster kind of existing so like that that that's like our big theme for 2025 is

you're just going to see a bunch of people create these like new apps new experiences and by having a forecaster account like your default experience with that app is just going to be better because you're going to have this like social graph that's publicly available that can just like improve that initial experience this is crazy this is this is you're blowing my mind right now man this is the future like this is I feel like I have so much respect for you because you were so early in decentralized Social and as we've seen it's it's had its it's had its big ups and it's had its Downs because you're in a speculative space where really speculation drives the narrative right now in Market Cycles but holy like

it just the stuff you're talking about makes so much sense and it is going to happen it is inevitable and I feel like it's look there's a lot of decentralized social apps that are out there they're doing great a lot of Protocols are out there doing great don't want to put shade on any of them but the stuff that you're talking about is just it's coming and whether it's 2025 or 2026 or 2027 as you said you think in decades not in years I don't know but this feels so obvious C can you in can like for our listeners and I know our listeners are thinking this like yo can I go invest in forecaster forecaster doesn't have a token yeah so there's no forecaster token I think like we're really just focused on building something really valuable for people to sign up and so

the way I think about it is like being on forecaster there's a decent chance like there are opportunities to make money and like not just in the like I find an asset and I want to buy and sell it that can happen sure but like people have received aird drops as a result of being on forecaster or people like they've gotten hired for jobs on forecaster like I mean obviously if you're building a company like people have raised money as a result like so so my point is like going back to the side you have a Social Network that has everyone with a crypto wallet there's an economic component to the network that is unlike other social networks out there and it's not an in-your-face like everyone's account has a ticker like that that not component to it is much as it'll feel very familiar but there's

just like a lot of economic activity happening kind of like out in the open under the hood and that in of itself I think makes it an interesting place to play around with yeah I think uh we we'll put a link in the show notes for anybody who uh is not on farcaster yet or or warp cast and you want to get over there we'll throw a link you guys can go check it out Dan thank you so much for your time today we went overtime on this interview so I hope I didn't hold you from any other meetings or anything you have really appreciate your time I think you know this is farcaster is going to be something to watch for 2025 and as you said for all of our listeners there's a lot of alpha over there a lot of opportunity uh across many ways and

the experimentation just incredible thanks for joining us today thanks for having me thanks for listening in everybody happy New Year once again and have a wicked awesome day as always if you liked today's episode please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us if you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free 5 minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game we're going to also leave a link for milk Road Pro you get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying this is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this show is

for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose thanks so much for listening in my friends have a wicked awesome day