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Last weekend, a generation of creators learned a painful lesson about platform risk (for about 12 hours). The TikTok debates about legality, morality, national interest, and youthful brainwashing will continue to rage long into Trump’s presidency. But, amidst the vitriol and uninformed Boomer takes on the timeline, a more interesting aspect of the drama was surprisingly underdiscussed:
To which, many will respond “Oh, boo hoo, a bunch of Fortnite dancers and makeup tutorial zoomers will have to get a real job now. Woe is me…”, so I think it’s important to take a second to appreciate just how impactful TikTok has been and just how wide its reach is.
I’ve dissected the means by which TikTok has emerged as an Alpha Predator at length here, so I won’t bore you with the gory details. But suffice to say that TikTok’s ability to connect any creator, small business, brand, or startup with their precise audience is unparalleled. It’s incredible. Tiktok knows my taste in music better than I know myself– and it serves up the heat endlessly.
This is evident in the numbers, as the platform has increasingly wolfed down market share:
It’s a better platform for niche creators, but it’s also a beast at scale. That sauce equates to a massive ROI on content and ad spend that startups, creators, and small businesses simply can’t find elsewhere. Particularly after Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) in April 2021, which hamstrung Meta’s (Facebook + Instagram) entire advertising apparatus by limiting its access to high fidelity user data. This has made it increasingly challenging to establish distribution (higher CAC, lower ROI on ad spend) for under-resourced players in the consumer space. More than that, on a very human level, TikTok has empowered any creator gritty enough to feed the algorithm with a seamless means to find his or her audience in a way that other platforms lack. This is why it’s been a darling for both brands and individuals alike.
As an aside- I’m not defending the platform as immune to political pressure and it very likely is a piece on the board of geopolitical propaganda. TikTok should be divested, and I generally think that it’s absurd to allow ByteDance (TikTok’s parent) unfettered access to U.S. markets when the U.S. tech powerhouses are unanimously blocked by the Chinese Firewall.
But the point here, really, is that TikTok has created a better mousetrap to connect humans at scale, and the generation of creators, startups, and brands who have devoted their blood, sweat, and tears to establishing the bedrock of their communities on that network experienced a rude awakening last week– the pain of walled gardens and the pitfalls of building a foundation on shifting sands.
Walled Gardens
Two thoughts that have been marinating in my skull:
How is it possible that, in the year of our lord 2025, creators still have virtually zero ownership over their audiences?
And, as much as it begrudges me to say this,
Crypto actually fixes this.
“Wynn, you mean the shitcoin infrastructure that just empowered our Grifter in Chief to make a mockery of the highest office in the land while simultaneously (and unabashedly) enriching himself and his family?”
Well… unfortunately, yes. But you must believe that, like any technology, the underlying is amoral. It’s the means and ends for which it’s used.
Allow me to explain.
When you think about it, it’s kind of absurd that the largest artist in the world, let’s say Taylor Swift, going to a new social media network (say, launching her Twitter presence) starts at 0 fans just the same as your conspiratorial Uncle who created an X account to ‘fight woke’. But maybe Taylor’s not the best example, because her people will find her. Let’s take it’s murph, one of my favorite emerging DJs. Sure, he’s got it on Spotify and Instagram, but when he launches on a de novo platform, he has virtually zero visibility. He has to shill repeatedly on every other Instagram post “Yo, I’m on X now, follow me on all platforms for show updates.” in order to cross-pollinate his audience and actually accrue value across all networks.
The fragmented nature of one’s audience is a minor nuisance for Taylor Swift’s marketing team, but it could be the difference of making rent for the starving artist who’s making ends meet with a couple of these creator payouts. I saw this first hand when I dated a Twitch streamer who made a healthy living on that platform, but who had to slog away for months to establish herself on Youtube as well. It’s a frustrating reality that brands and creators have to navigate engaging with their arbitrarily fractured audiences.
And in a post-Twitter (now X) world, your very livelihood, the success of your business or the runway of your startup, could be held hostage by the capricious whims of a technocrat or the everpresent shifts of the algorithm itself. We saw the self-interest of these walled gardens on full display when Elon acquired X and went to war shadow blocking and deprioritizing Substack links, which was on its way to becoming the de facto platform for long form content. I analyzed that at the time here, and Packy McCormick had many similar thoughts as well.
Most veteran creators know this. They’re wise to the game and there’s a very real reason that they all have a newsletter and (annoyingly) funnel you to it. Email is open and permissionless. Once a creator has your address, they’re offered an unmediated channel between themselves and their audience as well as the ability to switch mailing services frictionlessly. This kind of control simply doesn’t exist within traditional social media networks where the underlying platforms are highly incentivized to lock in both creators and audiences, at the expense of the freedoms of those very users.
Crypto Fixes This
But how does the technology powering your daily Trump family shitcoin actually stand to provide creator autonomy?
An Extremely Non-Comprehensive Blockchain Overview
At its simplest, blockchains like Bitcoin represent decentralized ledgers, with a network of computers all working in unison to validate the record. This is interesting for basic accounting functions like payments. Then came along next-gen chains like Ethereum and Solana which built smart contract functionality into the fabric of their software. This meant that next-gen blockchains of that time (the early teens) could be more than simple ledgers, but could act as decentralized computers, running more complex and varied programs whose state was verified by the network’s decentralized node base. What this has come to mean in practice is that, through these more performant blockchains, a global network of developers now has access to permissionless, shared infrastructure on top of which anyone can build, iterate, and collaborate. With smart contracts, a world of apps can be built on crypto rails– everything from financial applications like lending platforms to social protocols that track users and record content. The interoperable nature of blockchains means that anyone building in these ecosystems can tap the global pool of users and leverage the work of other projects built on chain. This is to say nothing of the added ability to coordinate capital through token incentives, which is beyond our scope here.
How This Could Be Applied to Social Media
A crypto-native ecosystem could empower creators in three key ways:
Audience ownership
Data empowerment
Financializing followings
Audience ownership and data empowerment is driven by the open nature of the data recorded by decentralized blockchains. For simplicity, interactions on chain are performed through a user’s wallet. As blockchains are distributed ledgers, the various interactions between wallets are public and verifiable. For the crypto-novice, you could think of a wallet address as something like an email address with financial capabilities, and in fact there are services to index and reserve your naming real estate (ex: ENS - Ethereum Naming Service) akin to domains on the traditional web.
Creators and builders in a crypto native ecosystem can capitalize on these open ledgers in a couple of ways. The blockchain records any given transaction between wallets, whether that be between individual users or the wallets of the apps themselves. What this means is that interactions between Wynn.eth and TSwift.eth (in the case of perhaps following Taylor’s account on a Web3 Spotify or Twitter) are open and available. The accessibility of this data allows Taylor Swift and team to see the various addresses that have interacted with her content. This is valuable in seeing frequency and depth of my interactions with her content, as well as similarities across other artists with whom I’ve interacted. But more than this, the team as well as other builders now have a higher fidelity view of who and how these wallets have interacted across her fan universe.
So, a competing social media app (let’s say a Web3 Twitter) could scrape this data for each new user that comes to its platform. When TSwift creates her Web3 Twitter account, she could automatically have the new platform push something to the fans of hers that had previously interacted with her wallet on Spotify (artist to fan). Or alternatively, I could have the Web3 Twitter scrape my wallet history for Spotify-relevant transactions with corresponding artist wallets that have since created accounts on their platform, and apply some rules-based approach to follow the artists with whom I’ve most interacted (fan to artist).
These data advantages can be sliced and diced hundreds of ways, many of which were experiments tested in the last cycle’s cambrian NFT explosion. We saw artists like Metallica drop NFTs for their super fans, thus providing the band with visibility into their fan base as well as ‘willingness to spend’ of super fans. We saw a swarm of startups attempt to disrupt the vampiric toll extracting TicketMasters of the world by bridging direct relationships between artists selling tickets and NFTs dropped directly into fans’ wallets. There was also an entire throughline of thought around curation and ‘proof of fandom’ where early superfans and music tastemakers now have verifiable demarcations of their curation in spotting up-and-coming artists, and you could envision artists later in their career rewarding their earliest fans (which they could easily identify down the line via historical interactions on chain).
Crypto continues to be a promising creator technology in so many ways, and this type of data and unmediated access has had technologists, creators, and artists foaming at the mouth for years now. Unfortunately, Web3 has largely failed to deliver on these ideas for a number of reasons– immaturity of the technology, lack of infrastructure, over-financialization, etc. That said, tech progress comes in fits and starts, and with each hype cycle the space has continued to serve up new attempts at revolutionizing the creator economy.
Who’s Trying Today
Farcaster is a startup founded in 2020 by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, two early employees at Coinbase and successful founders in their own right. The team has been building relentlessly for four years now, and they’ve seen some success, accruing $150M in funding from luminaries such as USV and a16z Crypto as well as peaking at around 80K DAU on their client Warpcaster:
But what is Farcaster?
Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social media stack being developed on blockchain rails.
That’s a lot of buzz words. Let’s unpack.
The organization of the network functions through two layers: the protocol (Farcaster) and the client (Warpcaster).
The protocol layer (Farcaster) is comprised of a collection of decentralized nodes (Hubs) that coordinate to record the data of the network. The nodes themselves are permissionless and independent such that communications cannot be arbitrarily censored and the data is openly accessible.
An aspect of the ‘sufficient’ caveat comes from the way that Farcaster is constructed, with a blend of on chain and off chain data. Blockchains, even the most performant, haven’t yet reached the point where it would be economically viable to store exclusively on chain the petabytes of data a social media network generates at scale, so the founding team has made structural compromises around what type of things should be immutably stored and what will be owned locally at the client/app level:
“The on-chain aspect of Farcaster is limited to identity; every user mints a unique Farcaster ID NFT (FID) to participate. This is their permanent ID in the Farcaster protocol. Users sign messages with their keys, mapping all their content to their FID. As FID lives on Ethereum it is censorship resistant.
The actual content (ie. the social graph) is stored in the off-chain Farcaster network run by Hubs. Hubs are like Ethereum nodes. Anyone can run a Hub. Hubs gossip messages to each other and frequently sync to have a consistent view of the network.” - Can Gurel, Farcaster in a Nutshell
Said another way:
“A social network achieves sufficient decentralization if two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it… [which] can only be true if developers can build many clients on the network.” - Varun Srinivasan, Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks
The team has built the ecosystem in such a way that it is credibly decentralized, with third party builders and users resting assured that their social graphs will not be arbitrarily compromised by the network.
Simply, “... the architecture decouples the data itself from the distribution. Hubs store and maintain the data. Apps decide on how they distribute it to the users.” – Can Gurel, When Farcaster Clicks
In the case of Farcaster the startup, the team has developed its own client (Warpcaster) which essentially acts as the front end through which users tap into the Farcaster (protocol) network. Akin to the way web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, etc.) interface with the internet, the content all exists at the permissionless protocol layer and then independent users can build any number of clients to interact with the Farcaster data in their preferred way. Today, Warpcaster looks much like Twitter meets Reddit, with a few crypto-native functions (like Frames, below).
In practice, this shifts the paradigm of how social media platforms compete, pushing innovation to the edges of the network. Dan Romero’s vision has been an open social ecosystem that is BYOC (bring your own client) and BYOA (bring your own algorithm), and it’s frequently a clapback of his to criticisms of Warpcaster’s functionality (“Don’t like our client? Build your own.”). If an individual or community is unhappy with Warpcaster’s content moderation policy or what its algorithms prioritize, the market has full autonomy to pounce on these weaknesses and develop a competing client. This kind of ‘forking’ can happen extremely rapidly, given that any new code base can pull all of the same network data as the incumbent. It’s a market with (near) perfect competition in which users and liquidity are fluid and clients must compete on vectors like UX and functionality in order to aggregate demand.
For example, Alana Levin enumerated a number of dimensions around which various clients could specialize to differentiate:
“If we anticipate a world where there are many engaging Farcaster clients, the question becomes, how do we get there? One route is for developers to directly build new clients: find a media type that isn’t a first-party citizen and build a client to give it a first-class experience. One could argue that this is how we saw popular apps in web2 find fit, from Instagram (images) to Twitter (micro-blogging) to YouTube (video) to Vine (very short-form video). Maybe there will be a similar pattern with new Farcaster clients as well — but I’d look for the emergent data types (like assets or Frames) as opposed to media types that developers have had years to iterate on. Twitter started out as micro-blogging but is now multimedia. Same with YouTube, Spotify, and many others. Thus, the unlock is probably in the new stuff: a first-party client for a data type folks haven’t yet mastered.” - Alana Levin, New Opportunities in the Farcaster Stack
Another aspect of the green space created by building a social network on crypto rails is the ability to integrate in-app payments seamlessly. Each user within the Farcaster network, regardless of client, is interacting with a wallet living on fully functional financial rails. This allows the interchange of creator payments, tokens, NFTs, etc. to be built directly into the feed, app, or client in a more native way than traditional social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. And in fact one of the most promising permutations within Warpcaster has been the introduction of Frames, which allow users to build miniature apps directly within their casts (think ‘tweets’) on Warpcaster. Frames have been created for everything from in-cast payments to collaborative gaming:
I fully anticipate Frames to drive the next leg up in the Farcaster ecosystem. The cost to ship light-weight, tiny apps is collapsing in a text-to-app powered AI world. Warpcaster’s design is uniquely situated to accommodate this in a way that many of the legacy social media titans are not.
Conclusion
The beauty of the internet is that it’s a living, ever-evolving network. Social media platforms of today are far cries from the MySpaces and AIMs that many of us grew up on. As these networks have become increasingly intertwined with the fabric of our society, the questions around ownership, censorship, and distribution have only gained importance. Elon has clearly identified this with his crusade to reorient Twitter as the global townsquare. In many ways, these last couple U.S. election cycles (deplatforming sitting presidents, prioritizing single party agendas, etc.) were a testament of their power and a prime exemplifier of the need for decentralized ownership.
The generation-defining attract-extract model of centralized social media continues to unfold in unanticipated and painful ways for the users of these walled gardens as well as the various startups that have attempted to build on top of them. It is yet to be seen whether crypto rails are the panacea or not. Regardless, in the face of absolute control and shifting sands beneath, the arc of empowerment should ultimately bend toward the user.
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