WTF is Farcaster? 🔮

The ultimate guide to Farcaster, and how to build apps on it. Plus, Frames.

Author

Juan Leal
February 09, 2024

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Farcaster and its explosive growth over the past few weeks — and if you haven’t made the leap yet, you may be thinking: What is it & how do I get started with it?

Here’s a quick explainer:

Farcaster is a decentralized network for web3 social media apps. It empowers users to own their social graph & interact with any app on the protocol — all with a single identity. Learn more in our beginner’s guide:

What is Farcaster? A Beginner's Guide

What Farcaster is, how it works, & where to start as a user. Plus: The most popular Farcaster clients.

http://blog.thirdweb.com/what-is-farcaster

Because it’s decentralized, this also means that anyone can create apps on Farcaster permissionlessly — without the platform risk that comes with most other social media apps today.

And with the network’s recent popularity, the hundreds of apps & clients built on top of it have also grown — presenting real opportunity for developers to build businesses on top of it without having the rug swept from under them.

So as a developer, how do you get started on Farcaster?

We created the ultimate guide for building a Farcaster app, with:

✦ A 100% free, open-source client template
✦ All of the main functionality (feeds, creating casts, & Sign-in with Farcaster)
✦ Onchain components (such as in-app NFT minting)

Read the in-depth guide and start building a Farcaster app in minutes:

🖼️ Guide: Create an NFT Minting Farcaster Frame

One of the catalysts for Farcaster’s explosive growth over the past few weeks was its launch of Farcaster Frames — enabling developers to build “mini-apps” that are embedded directly into posts.

We launched our own Farcaster Frame that enabled users to mint NFTs from a post, and created a guide for you to do the same.

✦ Works on any Farcaster client with Frames support
✦ Plug in any NFT smart contract, on any EVM chain
✦ Requires like & repost to mint

Build your own NFT Minting Frame on Farcaster — in under 10 minutes:

🎛️ Launch: Paymaster Control Center for Gasless Transactions

We launched our Account Abstraction toolkit last year — and since then, it’s been used to create hundreds of thousands of smart accounts with gasless & signless user experiences.

This week, we’re adding fine-grained gas sponsorship control to our smart accounts — enabling you to define rules around which types of transactions you cover for your users, and which ones you don’t:

→ Implement spend limits
→ Exclusively sponsor verified users & chains
→ Per-transaction fine grained control

For apps that use smart accounts, this enables a number of benefits — such as preventing abuse, onboarding users progressively, and incentivizing specific in-app actions.

Start building with sponsorship rules & take control of your app’s UX:

🌁 Build the Next Billion-Dollar Consumer Crypto App in SF

We’re partnering with Caldera, Pantera Capital, Haun Ventures, and Founders Inc. to host the Consumer Crypto Hackathon — bringing the hungriest builders together to build the next billion-dollar web3 consumer app, in San Francisco on February 16 – 18.

Winners will receive prizes ranging from 1 ETH, to $10,000+ in thirdweb Pro credits, to intros to VCs, to amplification on thirdweb’s social channels with 75k+ followers.

Register below to secure your spot in the Consumer Crypto Hackathon:

🎮️ Building a Web3 Gaming Engine with XAI

🔮 Mint to Read: The 2023 Consumer Crypto Report

2023 was a huge year for web3 — with numerous consumer crypto apps leveraging onchain tech & gaining meaningful traction.

The 2023 Consumer Crypto Report is a 30+ page report on the growth of web3 — with insights & data from Optimism, Ava Labs, & 10+ partners on how crypto is disrupting collectibles, social media, gaming, & more.

Get the report for free & mint your 2023 Consumer Crypto NFT:

🚢 thirdweb Changelog: Weekly Product Updates

Here are some of the updates we’ve made in the past few weeks:

We’re constantly shipping product updates to make thirdweb better. Get the latest updates in our Changelog.

Have a great rest of your week shippin’! 🚢 🛠️ 

And if you’re ever looking for 45,000+ other builders to learn from & share your web3 journey with, look no further than our Discord community 🤝