why farcaster was special 1/ both dan and varun spent a lot of time publicly communicating their priorities and thought process. this became more difficult as the network grew, but especially early on it was a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a pre-product market fit start up with an experienced team. 2/ the product got better every week. its hard to overstate how important this is for the morale of an online community. the team ruthlessly prioritized the pace of shipping that created a palpable velocity and anticipation for new features. 3/ the embedded wallet product was still the best wallet that I’ve used to date. if you graphed my onchain activity over time, the period starting from the wallet launch until earlier this year was easily 10-100x. if ethereum is going to grow, it needs something like this to exist. 4/ related, but the ability to move money frictionlessly between people and inside of applications embedded in the product felt like the future. the idea that every other app has a separate balance creates this strange archipelago of fractured liquidity. the farcaster wallet was a great solution for this and was on its way to eating a lot of other standalone products. 5/ the strength of their balance sheet, gave the community a lot of faith in how much time they were investing into a nascent social network. everyone knew that it wasn’t a sure thing, but knowing that the team had the funds to go the distance if a lane presented itself created a very strong reinforcing effect. this has affected my own beliefs on how much capital is necessary to raise for consumer products. 6/ the community itself was obviously very special. the fact that the initial seed was handpicked by Dan on boarded manually created a strong level of trust between strangers. even once the network went permission list the idea that there were “OGs” persisted and created a strong willingness to help people. 7/ the culture of the network was overwhelmingly builder oriented. it seems like every single person was building a startup or a product and so the quality and volume of feedback you could get from your immediate network was very high because it was filled with people going to the same process. 8/ there were moments where liquidity was injected into the community through airdrops (most notably Degen) that gave people enough extra cash to play around with exotic financial products that otherwise would’ve been dead on arrival. I sometimes think about crypto as an empirical economics project and it felt like there was enough money to really try novel experiments even at a small scale. 9/ the product was good and didn’t try to innovate too much on existing core flows. obviously it’s hard to have a breakout social product, but one of the mistakes that most founders make is trying to reinvent everything. If you were familiar with Twitter, you understood how the product worked, and that led to a relatively fast onboarding. Ultimately, it didn’t work, and that’s a shame. But the 5+ years that I spent on the network were some of the most enjoyable online experiences that I’ve had.