FarCon

FarCon is a community organized conference that just had its second annual event in Venice, California. About 500 people traveled from all over the world to meet and talk about the future of the Farcaster social network.

I know how difficult it is to produce high-quality events. Through my work at Bright Moments, I have a deep appreciation for the logistics that go into organizing an event of this scale. Because FarCon is a community project, the organizers received little to no compensation for their work, which makes the achievement even more impressive.

A few things stood out to me about this event:

The people

It's hard to understate the amount of enthusiasm expressed by attendees. Nearly everyone was effusive about the network and the impact it has had on their lives. This is a promising signal for a growing protocol and the biggest asset that Farcaster has over competitors with similar ambition. It's hard to fake the goodwill that the Warpcast team has developed.

The conference skewed male, but there was a fair amount of gender and ethnic diversity. Tech conferences always have a bit of a nerdy vibe, but the organizers made a conscious effort to support events that focused on other interests like art, fitness, and books. The main audience were users and developers, but there was an outsized representation of venture capital firms relative to other similar events I've attended. It seems like everyone is looking to place their bets on which companies will capture value within the ecosystem. This year has been pivotal for adoption and company formation, especially for alternative clients.

Most attendees had an overwhelmingly optimistic outlook on the future of Farcaster. This makes me nervous, since I've seen similar attitudes result in overinflated expectations and eventual disappointment, most recently from the artist community around NFT royalties. My biggest takeaway is that we need to carefully temper our optimism with pragmatic tradeoffs about the realities of a decentralized protocol and continue to act in good faith when forks in the road inevitably appear.

The venue

Venice is the perfect place to host a conference. The weather is fantastic year round and LA is imbued with a mix of circus-carnival weirdness and Hollywood glamour that creates a wonderful environment for guests.

If FarCon is going to continue to gain momentum, it makes sense to continue hosting it in LA (for now) to give some predictability and allow the community to separate location effects from interest in the event.

The products

Nearly every attendee I spoke to was building something on top of the Farcaster network. The current meta is alternative clients; there were at least five client teams in attendance, each trying to gain mindshare and users through new features and sign-up bonuses. L2s continue to creating low-cost applications, and the Base team was front and center to position themselves as the primary chain for developers building on the Farcaster social graph.

Interestingly, one of the biggest "products" were self-organized memecoin communities who were pushing merch for their tokens. Enjoy and Higher both had significant representation at the event and, unlike most conferences, the merch from the event was actually thoughtful and well designed.

These two areas, clients and memecoins, seem to be where most of the short-term value capture is taking place and where the majority of new capital flowing into the ecosystem is ending up.

Overall, I was energized by the amount of raw enthusiasm from attendees about the future of Farcaster. However, I would caution patience to anyone who expects raw enthusiasm or investment to directly translate to success. Sustaining ongoing authentic growth is one of the most difficult challenges in consumer applications. Social is a crowded playing field, and the last startup that reached a billion users was founded over a decade ago. Ironically, Snapchat's first office was just down the road from this year's FarCon, so maybe there is something in the water here for creating unicorns.

Special thanks to the organizers: Ted, Dylan, Erica, Matthew, and many, many others who helped make this year's FarCon a reality.