The protocol is ours now.

For anyone arriving for the first time: what is this place?

Farcaster is a protocol for social communication. Not a company. Not an app. A protocol — an open set of rules that anyone can build on and no one can own.

Think of email. No company owns email. Gmail is a client. Outlook is a client. The protocol underneath — SMTP — belongs to everyone. If Gmail disappears tomorrow, your ability to send email doesn't disappear with it.

Farcaster is that, but for social media. Warpcast is the main client — the app most people use. But the protocol doesn't need it to survive. The social graph, the messages, the identities — they live on an open, decentralized network that no single entity controls.

When you create a Farcaster account, you are minting a permanent identity on a blockchain. Your posts are signed by your cryptographic keys and broadcast to a network of independent nodes. Your followers, your reputation, your history — they belong to you.

That is the promise. And to understand why it matters so much, you need to know what happened here.

What happened. The truth.

There is a clean version of this story. Founder builds protocol, protocol grows, founder steps back. That version is a lie.

For over two years, thousands of people poured their energy, creativity, time, and belief into this protocol. Developers built hundreds of Mini Apps, bots, and novel systems. Artists created. Writers wrote. Communities formed. People made friends. Real ones — the kind that stay up with you at 3am debugging a contract or talking through a life crisis.

More importantly: people built reputation. Not followers. Not clout. The slow, honest accumulation of trust that comes from showing up day after day, creating things that matter, helping strangers, pushing boundaries.

And then the previous leadership walked away.

There was no network token. No concrete medium of belonging. No way for the people who built this world to own a piece of it. The community held nothing but trust. And then trust was broken.

This is not written out of bitterness. It is written because the truth matters. Because what happened next matters more.

And then we realized our friends were still here.

What the fuck do we do with this now? — the people who believed in a different future asked each other. They walked the empty streets, puzzled. Hoping for remembrances of what had happened here before.

And then they realized something:

The protocol was still there. The contracts on Optimism — still there. The Snapchain nodes running around the world — still there. The social graph of every connection — still there. The FIDs, the keys, the signed messages, the Mini Apps, the channels — all of it, running, open, belonging to no one and everyone at once.

A protocol does not need a founder. That is the entire point. The founder was a steward. The steward left. But the ocean didn't drain when the lighthouse keeper walked away.

This document is part of that movement. This is a new way of talking about Farcaster. Not the marketing page. The truth: this protocol almost died because it had no shared ownership, and it survived because the people who cared were too stubborn to leave.

Farcaster today doesn't look different from X to an outsider. The ethos doesn't shine through yet. That is what this document is the beginning of changing.

The most powerful number you'll ever own on the internet.

At the heart of everything is a FID — a Farcaster ID. A number registered on-chain, linked to your Ethereum address, owned by you. Not rented. Owned.

Every word you've written on Farcaster — every post, every like, every follow — is a cryptographically signed message attached to your FID. Not in a corporate database. On an open network. Readable by anyone. Deletable by no one but you.

Your FID works in every app built on Farcaster. If Warpcast disappears tomorrow, your identity doesn't disappear with it. Another client picks up where it left off. Your social graph, your history, your reputation — portable, permanent, yours.

This is the most powerful identity primitive of the new internet. Not because of technical tricks. Because it means you can never again be trapped inside someone else's walls.

The shape of the ocean.

Farcaster isn't a server. It's a living network — contracts, nodes, and open data flowing like currents.

Two layers. Optimism — the blockchain where permanent facts live: who you are, your keys, your storage. And Snapchain — a purpose-built network for daily communication. Over 9,000 messages per second. Dozens of independent nodes. Consensus that tolerates dishonesty and survives failure.

Above them, Neynar provides developer infrastructure — APIs, SDKs, webhooks. And above that, Warpcast and other clients give people a way to interact without thinking about any of it.

The words you'll need.

The case for $FARCASTER.

A protocol without a token is a nation without a currency. People can live there. People can build there. But they can never truly belong there.

Why the token is necessary

The recent events made one thing devastatingly clear: reputation without stake is a sandcastle at high tide. Thousands of people invested years of creative energy into Farcaster. They built its culture, its tools, its soul. And when the leadership departed, those people had nothing. No ownership. No governance rights. No economic claim on the world they built. Just the memory of what it felt like to believe.

This is not a design oversight. It is a structural failure. Every successful open network in history has solved this problem: Bitcoin gave miners BTC. Ethereum gave early participants ETH. Even the internet itself grew because the companies building on it could issue equity. The incentive alignment between builders and the network is not optional — it is the engine of everything.

Without a token, Farcaster faces three existential problems:

1. The builder drain. The most talented developers, artists, and community builders will eventually go where their effort is rewarded with ownership. Hope is a beautiful fuel, but it burns fast. You cannot ask people with families to work for hope indefinitely.

2. The governance vacuum. Who decides the future of the protocol? Right now the answer is unclear. A token creates a concrete mechanism: the people who hold it govern it. The more skin you have in the game, the more your voice matters. Not perfectly fair — but infinitely better than a small team making decisions behind closed doors and then vanishing.

3. The belonging gap. The FID is the most powerful identity primitive on the internet. But identity without economic participation is citizenship without a vote. A token turns passive users into active stakeholders. It transforms "I use this" into "I own this."

What $FARCASTER should be

Not a memecoin. Not a speculative asset. A coordination token — the economic layer that aligns everyone who cares about this network toward its long-term success. Something that rewards the people who already built this world and empowers the people who will build its future.

The token should serve four functions:

Governance. $FARCASTER holders vote on protocol upgrades, treasury allocation, and FIPs (Farcaster Improvement Proposals). One token, one vote. Delegation supported for those who want to empower representatives.

Staking. Snapchain node operators stake $FARCASTER to participate in consensus. This replaces trust with economic commitment — operators who act honestly earn rewards, operators who cheat lose their stake.

Storage. Storage rent — currently paid in ETH — transitions to $FARCASTER. This creates direct utility demand: every active user needs the token to maintain their presence on the network.

Rewards. A portion of annual emissions flows to active builders, node operators, and contributors — measured on-chain through verifiable activity, not committees or subjective grants.

Proposed supply and distribution

Total supply: 10,000,000,000 $FARCASTER (10 billion). Fixed supply. No inflation beyond the initial allocation. All vesting is on-chain and verifiable.

What is deliberately absent

No founder allocation. The founders left. They returned investor money. They made their exit. The token is for the people who stayed. This is not punitive — it is structural. The token represents future ownership, and its purpose is to reward future builders and retroactive contributors, not past equity holders who already chose their exit.

No VC allocation. Venture investors were returned their capital. Their relationship with Farcaster is settled. The token is not a fundraise. It is a distribution of ownership to the community that a fundraise model failed to serve. If institutional capital wants to participate, they buy on the open market like everyone else.

No pre-mine beyond the stated allocations. Every token is accounted for. Every vesting schedule is on-chain. Every treasury spend requires a vote. This is the opposite of what happened before — transparency as a structural commitment, not a marketing promise.

The distribution criteria: reputation as proof of work

The retroactive airdrop is the most important allocation. It must be done right. The entire thesis is: the people who built this network with their time and creativity deserve to own a piece of it.

Every criterion must be on-chain verifiable. No subjective panels. No "core team decides." The protocol's own data is the judge:

The philosophical argument

Every great protocol moment in history has been a moment of distribution. Bitcoin's genesis block. Ethereum's crowdsale. Uniswap's airdrop to every wallet that ever used the protocol. These were not financial events — they were acts of recognition. The network saying to its earliest participants: you built this. This is yours.

Farcaster missed that moment. The leadership chose a different path — venture funding, corporate structure, controlled development. That path ended when the leadership departed and returned the money. The venture model failed this network. It failed the builders, the creators, the dreamers who gave years of their lives to something they believed in.

$FARCASTER is the correction. Not a bailout. Not a consolation prize. A structural redesign. The moment where this protocol stops being something people use and becomes something people own.

Because ownership changes everything. When you own a piece of the network, you don't just build on it — you build for it. Every Mini App you ship, every cast you write, every friend you bring — it isn't just activity. It's an investment in something that's yours. The incentives align. The energy compounds. The flywheel turns.

And the people who stayed through the worst of it — who watched the founders leave, who picked up the pieces, who kept building when there was no rational reason to — those people deserve to be first in line.

The path forward

This proposal is a starting point, not a decree. The exact parameters — total supply, allocation percentages, vesting schedules, distribution formulas — should be debated, refined, and ultimately ratified by the community through a governance process. What matters is the principle:

The people who built Farcaster deserve to own Farcaster.

The technology is ready. The FID system provides sybil-resistant identity. Snapchain provides verifiable activity history. The smart contracts provide on-chain proof of commitment. Every criterion for a fair, transparent, verifiable distribution already exists in the protocol's own data. We don't need to build new infrastructure. We need the will to do what should have been done from the beginning.

The protocol is ours now. Let's make it official.

This document is a beginning.

If you're reading this and you've never heard of Farcaster — welcome. You're arriving at the exact right moment. The foundation is solid. The contracts are on-chain. The network runs. The tools exist. And for the first time, the community is free to shape this into what it was always meant to be.

Claim your FID. It is the most important thing you will ever own on the internet. It is your passport to a world being built right now, by people who refused to accept that the way things are is the way things have to be.