Events.xyz could become one of the main ways that new users join Farcaster. When you join an event, you could opt to create an FID or have one created for you automatically.
Creating a Farcaster account isn’t free (I think right now it’s around $3?). If you have to sign up 100 people for an event and it costs $3 to create an account, that’s $300 that someone has to pay. Multiply over hundreds or thousands of events and—it’s a lot.
Hosts don’t want to pay that cost and neither do we. I’m sure that there will be some VC-backed teams that subsidize it, but that doesn’t seem sustainable either.
When you sign up for Farcaster via Warpcast, the app creates a new ethereum address for you under the hood (this is your “custody address”). That’s because you need to call an ethereum contract called the “fname registry” to create a Farcaster account.
If we want to let users sign up with phone or email, we’d need to custody ethereum accounts for these users. However, that would require more infrastructure and it’s not really clear we should focus on this instead of features for our core audience.
We allow anyone with an ethereum address to RSVP to an event. Under the hood, we create a Farcaster account for the user and registers a signer for events.xyz.
They’d tap to pay the $3 protocol fee in their existing ethereum wallet. Then we’d create an account in our system with that new FID. Finally, after RSVPing they’d see a page to customize their new Farcaster profile.
The fee could lead to RSVP friction but I think many users would be okay with the cost. The bigger issue is ethereum adoption—most people don’t have an account yet. I don’t think we need to solve for that now because our core audience is Farcaster, but still.
It’s a great growth opportunity to be the place where a lot of people start their Farcaster journies. Also (lol) if there were a future airdrop where you’re rewarded for the number of q-dau that you invited to the protocol, that would be really great for us because all of our users are by definition real people.
If we’re going to do this, it needs to be our brand and not some wallet login company’s. Not sure why so many companies are so quick to give it up that brand moment.
last updated on April 28, 2024