Neynar is acquiring Farcaster. Over the next few weeks, we’ll transfer ownership of the protocol contracts and code repositories, the Farcaster app, and Clanker to Neynar. They will run and maintain everything going forward. Some members of the Merkle team, Varun, and I will step back from day-to-day work on Farcaster and move on to something new. Rish, Manan, and the rest of the Neynar team have been building on Farcaster from the start. Neynar was one of the first Farcaster clients, and its infrastructure now powers much of the developer ecosystem. We think they are the right people to take over leadership of Farcaster and they’ll share their new builder-focused vision soon. This wasn’t an easy decision. Farcaster and the people building on it mean a lot to us. We’re proud of what our team built, and what the community built alongside us. But after five years, it’s clear Farcaster needs a new approach and leadership to reach its full potential. We’re excited to see what Farcaster becomes under Neynar, and we’re looking forward to this next chapter. Varun & Dan *** FAQ What’s changing? To start, almost nothing. The Farcaster app and Clanker operate as normal with most of the features you are using today. There should be no interruption to your day-to-day experience. For developers, we’re transitioning the protocol contracts and code repositories over to Neynar. They will also start running the developer calls. What is Merkle doing? The Clanker team is continuing on with Neynar, some of the team is joining another company and some of the team is planning to do something different.

The best use case for content coin or creator econ on SocialFi is probably Porn. That’s why Coinbase or base(or Farcaster) having a very hard time to deliver such use case.

“Human Assets” “Psychological Value Add” “Desperation Score” “Benefit Fees” “Predictive Modeling” “Tip Theft 2.0” Algorithmic Serfdom. https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comm… https://farcaster.xyz/miniapps/2-GbJ1W4o…

The Moltbook AI hype may all be fake It turns out some of the most viral "AI agent" posts weren't autonomous behavior at all. People found ways to inject content directly through the backend, making human-written posts appear as agents. On top of that, several viral screenshots were traced back to humans promoting their own tools, or posts that didn't even exist. Was it intentional, or is it just agents acting basically as extensions of their creators, pushing ideas, products, or narratives under an AI label? Hard to tell... Add inflated agent counts, and agents hallucinating conversations and events that never happened (i.e. lying to get attention), and the signal gets noisy fast. Moltbook still works and the agents still run. But once attention hit, humans rushed in to game it. Not an AI awakening. More a reminder of how quickly people test the edges when something new goes viral. Source: galnagli, TheAIGRID

Most of the crypto industry's mistakes are because cryptobros seem to be either ignorant or delusional about a mountain of evidence from the real world. They never seem to learn, and keep repeating the same mistakes over and over, shockingly till this very day. DAOs should have been based on cooperatives instead of public companies. Were that so, they would actually be decentralised, rather than corporatist theatre. DeFi shouldn't have tried every single mechanism that had been proven to fail time and time again through centuries of economic history. We should have pivoted from a 100% focus on infra to applications in 2021/22, and maybe we would have growing usage now. Instead, growth in demand has been a negligible fraction of even pessimistic expectations. Gambling has devastated economies countless times throughout history. In crypto, the worst gambling was encouraged with zero resistance, and that has now destroyed the altcoin market. Many, many, such cases.

You do not have to agree with me on which applications are and are not corposlop to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with me on what trust assumptions are acceptable in which situations to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with me on political topics to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with my views on defi, decentralized social or privacy-preserving payments to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with my views on AI to use Ethereum. You do not have to agree with my view that Berlin has the best food in Europe, suits and ties should be expunged from our culture, and YYYY-MM-DD is the best date format to use Ethereum. And you do not have to agree with me on any one of those above things to agree with me on any other. I do not claim to represent the whole Ethereum ecosystem. Ethereum is a decentralized protocol. The whole concept of "permissionlessness" and "censorship resistance" is that you are free to use Ethereum in whatever way you want, without caring about what I think, or even what anyone else in the Ethereum Foundation or even any Ethereum client developer thinks. But on the flipside, if I say that your application is corposlop, I am not "censoring" you. This has always been the flip side of the grand bargain of free speech: I am not free to shut you down, but I am free to criticize you, much as you are free to criticize me. In fact, it is *necessary* that we do this. The modern world does not call out for pretend neutrality, where a person puts on a suit and claims to be equally open to all perspectives from all of humanity and not have their own opinions. Neutrality is for protocols (like HTTP, like Bitcoin, like Ethereum), and neutrality within some scope is for some institutions. The modern world calls out for the courage to clearly state one's principles - including stating principles by pointing to negative examples, that is by criticizing the things in the world that are incompatible with one's principles - and work with those with aligned goals to build the metaverse within which those principles are taken as a baseline. Such things inherently cannot be constrained to just the layer of the protocol: any principle you have will naturally lead to conclusions, not just about how the protocol should be built, but also what should be built upon it. Furthermore, any such principle will have consequences that go beyond technology, and reach into specific questions within the larger social world. This should not be avoided. Valuing something like "freedom", and then acting as though it has consequences on technology choices, but is completely separate from everything else about our lives, is not pragmatic - it is hollow. The inevitable converse of this is that (i) a decentralized protocol must not be viewed as belonging to only one metaverse, and (ii) the borders of a metaverse are fuzzy: it is possible, and indeed it is the normal case, to align with any one on some axes and not on other axes. Linux is a technology of user empowerment and freedom, Linux is also the base layer of a lot of the world's corposlop. It's almost certainly the base layer of many things that I think are good, and you think are bad, and vice versa. Hence, if you care about Linux because you care about user empowerment and freedom, it is not enough to just build the kernel, we must also build a full-stack ecosystem compatible with those values, and explicitly accept that this is not the only way that people will use Linux, but it is one way that must be built and must be available. Ethereum is similar. Milady.

In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social. If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top. In fact, since the start of the year I've been back to decentralized social already. Every post I've made this year, or read this year, I made or read with https://firefly.social/, a multi-client that covers reading and posting to X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky (though bluesky has a 300 char limit, so they don't get to see my beautiful long rants). But crypto social projects has often gone the wrong way. Too often, we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin into something, that counts as "innovating", and moves the world forward. Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about _subscribing to creators_, not _creating price bubbles around them_. Over the past decade, we have seen many many attempts at incentivizing creators by creating price bubbles around them, and all fail by (i) rewarding not content quality, but pre-existing social capital, and (ii) the tokens all going to zero after one or two years anyway. Too many people make galaxy-brained arguments that creating new markets and new assets is automatically good because it "elicits information", when the rest of their product development actions clearly betray that they're not actually interested in maximizing people's ability to benefit from that information. That is not Hayekian info-utopia, that is corposlop. Hence, decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social. The Aave team has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point. I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the "social": even back when the decentralized social space barely existed, they were trying to figure out how to do encrypted tweets. I plan to post more there this year. I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible. https://firefly.social/post/x/2013614839…

How I would do creator coins We've seen about 10 years of people trying to do content incentivization in crypto, from early-stage platforms like Bihu and Steemit, to BitClout in 2021, to Zora, to tipping features inside of decentralized social, and more. So far, I think we have not been very successful, and I think this is because the problem is fundamentally hard. First, my view of what the problem is. A major difference between doing "creator incentives" in the 00s vs doing them today, is that in the 00s, a primary problem was having not enough content at all. In the 20s, there's plenty of content, AI can generate an entire metaverse full of it for like $10. The problem is quality. And so your goal is not *incentivizing content*, it's *surfacing good content*. Personally, I think that the most successful example of creator incentives we've seen is Substack. To see why, take a look at the top 10: https://substack.com/leaderboard/technol… https://substack.com/leaderboard/culture… https://substack.com/leaderboard/world-p… Now, you may disagree with many of these authors. But I have no doubt that: 1. They are on the whole high quality, and contribute positively to the discussion 2. They are mostly people who would not have been elevated without Substack's presence So Substack is genuinely surfacing high quality and pluralism. Now, we can compare to creator coin projects. I don't want to pick on a single one, because I think there's a failure mode of the entire category. For example: Top Zora creator coins: https://www.coingecko.com/en/categories/… BitClout: https://www.businessofbusiness.com/artic… Basically, the top 10 are people who already have very high social status, and who are often impressive but primarily for reasons other than the content they create. At the core, Substack is a simple subscription service: you pay $N per month, and you get to see the person's articles. But a big part of Substack's success is that they did not just set the mechanism and forget. Their launch process was very hands-on, deliberately seeding the platform with high-quality creators, based on a very particular vision of what kind of high-quality intellectual environment they wanted to foster, including giving selected people revenue guarantees. So now, let's get to one idea that I think could work (of course, coming up with new ideas is inherently a more speculative project than criticizing existing ones, and more prone to error). Create a DAO, that is *not* token-based. Instead, the inspiration should be Protocol Guild: there are N members, and they can (anonymously) vote new members in and out. If N gets above ~200, consider auto-splitting it. Importantly, do _not_ try to make the DAO universal or even industry-wide. Instead, embrace the opinionatedness. Be okay with having a dominant type of content (long-form writing, music, short-form video, long-form video, fiction, educational...), and be okay with having a dominant style (eg. country or region of origin, political viewpoint, if within crypto which projects you're most friendly to...). Hand-pick the initial membership set, in order to maximize its alignment with the desired style. The goal is to have a group that is larger than one creator and can accumulate a public brand and collectively bargain to seek revenue opportunities, but at the same time small enough that internal governance is tractable. Now, here is where the tokens come in. In general, one of my hypotheses this decade is that a large portion of effective governance mechanisms will all have the form factor of "large number of people and bots participating in a prediction market, with the output oracle being a diverse set of people optimized for mission alignment and capture resistance". In this case, what we do is: anyone can become a creator and create a creator coin, and then, if they get admitted to a creator DAO, a portion of their proceeds from the DAO are used to burn their creator coins. This way, the token speculators are NOT participating in a recursive-speculation attention game backed only by itself. Instead, they are specifically being predictors of what new creators the high-value creator DAOs will be willing to accept. At the same time, they also provide a valuable service to the creator DAOs: they are helping surface promising creators for the DAOs to choose from. So the ultimate decider of who rises and falls is not speculators, but high-value content creators (we make the assumption that good creators are also good judges of quality, which seems often true). Individual speculators can stay in the game and thrive to the extent that they do a good job of predicting the creator DAOs' actions.