This year, the SocialFi track has risen strongly. Among them, the highly-watched decentralized social protocol Farcaster has been strongly promoted by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Its daily active users have increased by 28 times since this year, with a total number of users exceeding 380,000, and the number of tweets has increased by 180 times.

Farcaster recently completed a $150 million Series A financing, led by Paradigm, and other participating institutions include a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV, Variant and Standard Crypto. This financing has brought Farcaster's valuation to $1 billion, which is a major progress after completing a $30 million seed round of financing in mid-2022. Dan Romero, co-founder of Farcaster, said that the focus in the future will be on increasing the number of daily active users and adding developer basic components to the protocol, such as channels and direct messaging functions.

Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol that provides an open and composable community layer for developers, creators and users. Developers can build clients based on this protocol. Currently, the most mainstream one is Warpcast, and the Mirror team is also developing the Farcaster client Kiosk. Farcaster adopts a hybrid architecture of on-chain and off-chain: 1. On-chain part: handles key operations related to identity authentication, including user identity registration, key management, allocation of user data storage space, and fee management. These operations are executed on Optimism using smart contracts, and users need to pay about $5 per year to register for Farcaster's client. 2. Off-chain part: handles user-generated content, such as user-posted messages (Casts), which are received, stored, and verified on server nodes called Hubs. Hubs not only store data, but are also responsible for synchronizing and disseminating verified messages within the network to ensure data consistency and wide accessibility. This architecture uses the security of blockchain to manage key data, while processing and storing large amounts of social interaction data through traditional servers to improve efficiency and reduce costs. In addition, the token $Degen launched by the Degen channel in Warpcast has become the iconic token of the Farcaster ecosystem. $Degen can be used to reward content creators in the community, mint NFTs on platforms such as Zora and Highlight, and even as a transaction token within applications and games, such as the on-chain short video application Drakulal and Bracket game.

Farcaster's financing news has boosted the price of $Degen. According to Coingecko data, after the news was released, $Degen rose from $0.019 to $0.022, an increase of more than 15% in two hours, and continued to rise to $0.0233 this afternoon, an increase of 17.2% in the past 24 hours.