The other week at FarCon and FarHack was one of the most electric and gratifying weeks of my life. From seeing events that took six months to plan come to fruition to witnessing a Cambrian explosion in the developer ecosystem to continuing lifelong-connections with community members -- there's a lot to take away and catch up on from last week. Below is my attempt of doing so!
I'm going to break this recap up into three parts: the events, the takeaways, and the future
Side note: I've also turned farhack.xyz into a commemorative gallery that highlights this year's event, make sure to check it out!
The Events
FarCon 2024 was a community driven event hosted in Venice Beach to bring our online connections from Farcaster to life(URL -> IRL). We were fortunate enough to build off of Cameron and Grin's work from the inaugural FarCon, which took place last year in Boston. The main draw of FarCon 2024 was our Summit, a one-day event centered around the most pertinent topics and brands in the ecosystem -- an event whose capacity 5x'd in size over the last few months as the protocol grew!
We got extremely fortunate and were able to host the Summit(and many of the week's events) at 57 Windward, a venue right under the iconic Venice sign that was able to hold our main stage outside as well as various setups(stages, shops, etc) throughout three floors of the building. This venue was perfect to running into folks and made Venice feel like Farcaster City for a week!
From scheduling alone, my favorite talk of the day was the keynote from Dan and Varun -- who outlined the three keys to Farcaster's future: growing with crypto, creating cozy corners, and building more legos. The simplest TLDR I could give from the talk is that they think if Farcaster stays the center of crypto, we can continue to grow with the industry and build more spaces/tools that will lead to true mainstream adoption down the line(a long game for sure).
However from an overall perspective, hands down my favorite part of the Summit were the countless run-ins and conversations I had with friends old and new. There's no cooler feeling in the Farcaster community than, "oh you're [insert username]? we interact all the time!" It felt like I knew so many folks who I hadn't even met in person yet, and everyone I spoke to was in great spirits, focused both on enjoying the moment and thinking about how we can take this space to the next level.
But once the summit ended, I sprinted over to start setting up for FarHack and it took up all of my attention through Sunday afternoon. I heard people at the welcome mixer and summit talking about their excitement for FarHack, and I was so delighted to see that energy continue during the kick-off on Friday.
FarHack's Friday kick-off had over 200+ attendees with standing room only, and hackers were able to hear from ecosystem partners in 15 lightning talks. Folks were eager to meet others to create teams, ask the partners specific development questions, and overall start jamming on ideas. Hackers were so dialed in that both of our hackathon venues were nearly at capacity all afternoon Friday and most of Saturday!
One of the main FarHack highlights was that we were able to use Farcaster-native hackathon software built by Matthew at events.xyz(huge shout-out to him for all his work on this!) Hackers were able to sign in with their Farcaster account, invite members to their team with unique links, and select bounties that we hosted through Bountycaster.
And on top of that, attendees of the FarHack closing brunch/ceremony on Sunday were able to vote IRL on the overall winners in a frame made by horsefacts(huge shout-out to him as well!) We tried to make as much of the FarHack experience Farcaster-native through-and-through, and I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out!
Huge shout-out again to our overall winners(above), all prize winners(available on farhack.xyz), and all FarHack attendees -- it's your energy that made the inaugural FarHack a success! It made me super happy not only that everyone in the community was so willing to help each other, but also that the overall(non-dev) community showed up in such a big way during the closing on Sunday. That kind of support shows how much everyone cares about the products they're using and how special it is for this community to uplift developers.
The Takeaways
Farcaster is family. There are so many people I have gotten to know from being on Farcaster over the past two years and the vast majority of them that I've interacted with are extremely kind, interesting, curious, and well-meaning. Running into and spending more time with them, especially in more intimate contexts like dinners and in-person conversations, was a great time and another reminder of how strong this community can be. It's also been awesome to watch a group of builders who were early to Farcaster continue to grind through tough times and come out the other side thriving.
Farcaster is a schelling point for the best use cases of crypto. It's becoming clear that the hottest crypto use cases are converging at Farcaster -- whether that's to build on the social graph or to connect with others / shill. While this can have positive and negative impacts, I think the positive impacts far outweigh the negative ones because it incentivizes the types of conversations and builders that can ultimately grow the protocol.
A new wave of users might onboard, and even solely interact, through a channel. One topic I heard a lot(and that I've been thinking about a lot more) was how particular channels might be better ways to onboard new groups of people to Farcaster -- and if taken far enough, might be the only way that certain users interact with Farcaster. A key reason I like this idea is that I've been thinking about net new apps on top of Farcaster, specifically that it's something more people should do. With this in mind, you could think of there being an app for NBA-fans built on top of Farcaster, or a commerce-app that uses Farcaster and frames under the hood (or any type of community app). The beauty of building on it is that developers can spend more time focusing on the features that make their app unique and there's built-in composability if a developer wants to interact with other clients or tools in the ecosystem. The goal with someone building an app like this shouldn't be to build the best Farcaster app for a channel, but to build the best overall app for a particular type of community(regardless of the fact that it uses Farcaster under the hood).
Client diversity is one of the best thing happening in the community right now. I'm so happy that a new wave of serious clients are emerging -- from Supercast to Nook to Kiosk (and many others). Other than these developers being able to build sizable business on top of Farcaster, client diversity excites me for two main reasons. First, it gives users more feature optionality -- which will overall lead to better features and more tailored experiences for different types of users. And second(a bit more important in my eyes as a dev), I think it'll lead to even more shared infrastructure between clients(signer management, cast link sharing, settings etc) -- which will make developers focus on the unique features they can build instead of sitting behind a particular moat they have in the Farcaster stack.
The FarCon '24 team was legendary, and I was honored to even be there. Especially for a conference where an unofficial collective is running it instead of a company, the entire team stepped up in amazing ways. There are too many thank you's to give out personally, but just know that I appreciate everyone beyond belief and this was an experience for the record books.
The Future
Now here we are, the scary part 😅
Personally, I don't fully know what my future looks like, or what Farcaster's future looks like! I can tell you the things that I think are a lot more certain though.
I'm going to continue to build out FarHack as a brand. As I said above I don't fully know what that looks like, but I know that more hackathons will be a good part of it! I have a few other ideas as well that I think could be exciting, but overall I think however FarHack continues will be positive and the energy from last week's 48 hour hackathon alone has me pumped up about what more can be done. I'll be sure to share updates once I get a sense of what that will all look like!
I think these are still super early days for Farcaster. I'm still more bullish than ever that Farcaster has so much room for growth and that Farcaster will have a long life as core Internet infrastructure, similar to long-lasting protocols such as HTTP and TCP/IP. I have trust in three things that I think are going to keep driving Farcaster forward: the Warpcast team, the community, and the strength/increasing strength of the infrastructure.
I think there will be more FarCons. As McBain(Graham) said above, the FarCon 2024 team isn't tying itself to FarCon -- we don't have ownership over any future FarCons. With that being said, we're still more than happy to help advise folks(I'm sure we'll share more insights once we all have time to recover), I'm sure folks will organize more FarCons(as long as they are well intentioned and the community is all for it :D), and I'm still a huge fan/believer in the URL to IRL pipeline that Farcaster offers(and its power).
I want to keep focusing all of my time on or around Farcaster. There have been many times where I've thought if there are other things I'd want to turn my attention to in other fields/subdomains, but I keep coming back to Farcaster any time I really sit down to think about it. Being this early, being this connected to an incredible community, and the continued increase of composability to build on top of continue to draw my interest and make me want to take even bigger bets on Farcaster. Rest assured, I'm not going anywhere!
Thanks again to everyone who has supported and who I was able to meet/speak with at FarCon and FarHack! I'm always around if you want to talk about Farcaster ideas or FarHack, feel free to DC me on Warpcast.
