What are Farcaster Frames? Discover Frames built on Safe smart accounts

TL;DR: Build your own ERC-4337 Safe account inside a Farcaster Frame, and follow us there!

Farcaster is the latest “sufficiently” decentralized social network (deSoc or SocialFi) to capture attention. With key opinion leaders such as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Jesse Pollak from Base, Dan Romero from Farcaster, and Ethereum core developers like Tim Beiko active on the platform, the onchain social network has been garnering impressive traction with currently close to a quarter of a million users, including Safe!

About Farcaster

Farcaster is an open-source protocol built on Optimism, the L2 secured by Ethereum. The project was kickstarted in 2020 by former Coinbase employees, Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan and raised $30M.

After an initial invite-only mechanic which saw participation via organic social graphs, Farcaster transitioned to a paid model in 2024, with users paying a one-time sign-up fee of $5 which also acted as a bot-prevention scheme. The sign-up fee includes the rental of storage units that limits users to 5,000 casts for the year.

In the backend, Farcaster has a hybrid onchain/offchain architecture to scale the network. Some data is stored onchain, while others are stored offchain for overall higher efficiency.

The SocialFi landscape

Interest in the decentralized social media (DeSoc) use case has been building in the public consciousness for a while, with an increasing awareness of how our data and privacy cannot be left under the single control of centralized web2 social apps like Meta, X, and Instagram.

Apart from data breaches, under concerning issues include censorship – how profiles can be shut down or erased – as well as how our content and data can and have been sold to third parties such as advertisers for profit that does not directly accrue back to the user. 

As an alternative, social network disruptors such as friend.tech, hey.xyz, Drakula.app and Farcaster are leading the new wave of social disruption, onchain. Does anyone remember Steemit?

The attraction of these deSoc or SocialFi networks is that they also feature interesting and engaging social incentives such as a profile marketplaces and tipping that add a financialized dimension to the social graph. For example on Farcaster, good content is rewarded in DEGEN while for Drakula.app it is BLOOD, which can be swapped for DEGEN.

On these dapps, users actually own their content and data, and can easily port their accounts between different clients such as Warpcast or Supercast without deplatforming risk. In fact, anyone can build a Farcaster client, and are encouraged to!

The beauty of an interoperable protocol like Farcaster is that it can interact seamlessly across compatible networks and smart contract protocols, such as ENS, and Safe! Imagine controlling multiple social apps through one unified social ID/account that you own – that’s what Farcaster aims to do.

Farcaster growth

Farcaster activity has been healthy and growing, with a breakout surge occurring in late January due to the introduction of Farcaster frames, where it saw a 400% increase in one week alone from 5,000 to 24,700 daily active users (DAU) from Jan 28 to Feb 3, 2024. 

To date, the protocol has earned close to 800k in revenue.

Check out this dashboard built by @pixelhack to view aggregated metrics of the platform, including most popular channels such as Base, Degen, and Zora.

What are Farcaster Frames?

Frames introduced an influx of new users to Farcaster. Frames allow different kinds of interactions in a user post or ‘cast’. Actions can be anything from polls to voting in DAO governance, minting NFTs, playing games, and making transactions – all within your timeline and without needing you to sign an extra transaction.

Dan Romero explains further in this interview: 

“Frames are interactive social media posts. And the best analog to think about is when you use Twitter, you can post a tweet with text, image, video, and then there's one type of post that you can do on Twitter that has some interactivity, and that's a poll, right?...But with a poll, Twitter controls that entire experience and you can't modify it. You can't come up with a new creative way of displaying that poll or another use for those buttons. It's pretty constrained.

With Frames, it gives developers a kind of total canvas within our app to kind of display content and then have interactivity, define what the buttons that will show up next to a frame. And so it's kind of almost like a mini app within an app.”

Read the Farcaster docs or this awesome-frames resource repository to learn more.

Farcaster Frames built on Safe

What are some cool Farcaster Frames built on Safe? We ran a Frames bounty program in February and below are the winners from that and the ETHGlobal London hackathon, as well as some spotted in the wild!

Deploy a Safe smart account on Base Sepolia test net by limone.eth

Create a New Safe Account by Palmera

Frame HeartBit by Fileverse team

Deploy a Safe on Arbitrum in 1-click by Brahma

Safe Bank in a Frame by jaycub.eth

Introducing Tips: send small donations with Frames by destiner

Build a Safe in a Frame

Join the league of legends. Build your own ERC-4337 Safe account inside a Frame!

Explore the Top Frames Directory

From getting a tarot card reading to buying girl scout cookies and engaging in group chats in a frame, browse the Directory of Frames on Farcaster built by Corbin (also Safe Guardian) and explore new fun frames on Farcaster.

You know what to do, join Farcaster to experience it for yourself and follow us!

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