This Week on Crypto Twitter: Farcaster, Vision Pro, Dencun, Oh My!

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. 

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. 

Others crowned it the long-awaited but yet-to-arrive Web3 social networking standard. 

Eventually, however, after over a week spent showering Farcaster with praise, some were eager to move on to other subjects. 

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. 

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.” 

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.  

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.