№498 · @dankshard

Item№498

I just listened to the latest Bankless weekly recap where they spent a few minutes discussing Farcaster’s pivot from a web3 social platform to a wallet/trading app. It's worth considering their opinion, as they pretty accurately represent the perspective of the onchain mainstream crypto users. Honestly, what they said was quite sobering. They didn't even question why this was happening, or if it was a bad move. They basically just accepted the fact that web3 social is a dead area in the industry, something we tried once, similar to web3 gaming. It was a good tech experiment, but they don't see any real value in it. They literally said, "it didn't take off." Are they right? Looking from inside our niche, absolutely not. But looking from the outside, at the numbers, probably. Of course, the abandoned creators, who were genuinely enjoying the platforms, seem louder to us, but let’s be real, that's a tiny bubble. Just like in every other corner of crypto, interest only pops up here when it's tied to some kind of speculation. Let’s look at the last few years: - Lens peaks: Airdrop hype, Bonsai boom, L2 airdrop hype (each with increasingly inflated excitement and lower peaks). - Farcaster peaks: Clanker hype, Pro subscription hype (pure speculation on the pro sub's value), Base/Coinbase hype (and the Base airdrop that came with it), Warplet free money (NFT hype). - Friendtech: The entire thing was one massive speculative wave that just came and went. In every single case, there was zero user influx from outside the crypto niche. **The takeaways**: The crypto mainstream considers web3 social dead until the next big hype wave arrives. We've completely failed to onboard the mainstream over the last 3-4 years. Despite any issues they have with it, using Musk's/Zuck's garbage or Spotify is a much better trade-off for them than diving into the rabbit hole of crypto wallets/tokens/NFTs, especially when it doesn't even promise a bigger audience. There’s not much we can do about the mainstream. It is what it is. You can't build against trillion-dollar companies. If you had a weapon to fight them, they would have bought it for a few hundred million a long time ago and integrated it into their own system. That's the thing. However, the crypto niche is still reachable. No matter how dead they think this sector is right now, they will jump on the next big ride. The only question is: Who will create the speculative hype that they'll follow? Either way, I think we have to accept that just catering to creators and artists will never be enough for a web3 social app to succeed. I see zero real progress in that direction through the last 4 years. **The takeaways of the takeaways:** If you want to build in Web3, it is essential to build around degen speculators since they are your potential user base and even this will only keep them engaged temporarily. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1PzAfBxUsQ

Collected13 DEC 2025

Published13 DEC 2025

Paid0.10 GHO

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