Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt
Crypto Twitter’s inhabitants spent the week fawning over life on another platform—Farcaster, the ascendent decentralized social media protocol—as well as other novel tech innovations.
In a matter of days, Farcaster catapulted from relative obscurity to crypto industry darling, principally thanks to the debut of a novel feature on the network—Frames—that allows users to play games, mint NFTs, and make purchases while remaining in a social media feed.
Twitter users gushed about the app, which has seen exponential growth in activity since the launch of Frames on January 26.
While @friendtech‘s activity has dropped 97% from its peak,
@farcaster_xyz has seen a 214% increase in DAU since the introduction of their simple yet powerful “Frame” function on Jan 30 🟢.
More than that, thanks to their incredible UX and crypto-native content and channel,… pic.twitter.com/1IkjcQZJMq
— Poopman (💩🦇🔊) (@poopmandefi) February 4, 2024
Several Twitter alternatives, both on-chain and off-chain, have come and gone in the last two years. Few, though, have managed to pry users away from Twitter itself, even given Elon Musk’s divisive and tumultuous stewardship of the platform.
Some Crypto Twitter users excitedly proclaimed this week that Farcaster was quickly becoming more than just a novelty scroll.
Checked Farcaster before Twitter this morning
— niko (@nikokampouris) February 7, 2024
Others crowned it the long-awaited but yet-to-arrive Web3 social networking standard.
now that farcaster developed lungs can we stop pretending discord is a web3 social
— Mia (@miaferrariii) February 6, 2024
Eventually, however, after over a week spent showering Farcaster with praise, some were eager to move on to other subjects.
Thank god bitcoin went up so everyone can stop pretending to care about Farcaster
— David G 🏹 (@d_gilz) February 9, 2024
Technological novelty seemed to be the dominant theme of the week, with other Twitter users marveling at the many dazzling applications of Apple’s new Vision Pro augmented reality headset, which went on sale last Friday.
The first week of the Vision Pro was absolutely insane.
Here are 12 examples that prove the Vision Pro is the best piece of tech ever invented.
1) Next-level surgerypic.twitter.com/aDuig5IN7w
— Stephen Flanders (@SteveFlanders22) February 9, 2024
Some, however, came down more harshly on the new product due to its cumbersome design and hefty price. NFT artist Beeple, always one to put things bluntly, lambasted the Vision Pro as a “shitty product with zero market fit.”
ok first off I want to start this Vision Pro review with some background.
I have owned just about every major VR headset since the DK1. I also worked for a few years doing concepts for Magic Leap, and am EXTREMELY bullish on AR as the next era of computing. I see this as… pic.twitter.com/Lt3GXsCleG
— beeple (@beeple) February 7, 2024
One innovation that everyone on Crypto Twitter appeared unanimously in approval of this week was Ethereum’s upcoming Dencun upgrade, which the network’s developers announced will deploy on March 13.
Dencun will, after years of waiting, introduce proto-danksharding to Ethereum—a method that, with the aid of “blobs,” will sample and store data in a manner that makes transactions on Ethereum layer-2 networks substantially faster and cheaper.
Blobs are coming to mainnet at slot 8626176 .oO
— timbeiko.eth ☀️ (@TimBeiko) February 8, 2024
Proponents of layer-2 networks giddily rejoiced about the news on Twitter this week, hopeful that the upgrade will mark a new chapter for efficiency standards on Ethereum-based blockchains.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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