Introducing Snapchain
Snapchain is a new data layer for the @farcaster_xyz social network, which keeps apps in sync.
It's written in Rust, can handle 10k+ TPS and will support millions of daily users.
Varun Srinivasan
1,680 posts
Varun Srinivasan
@varunsrin
Joined February 2009
- Snapchain is now live! It's a blockchain designed for social networks and is capable of reaching over 9,000 TPS. Snapchain powers the @farcaster_xyz network. Over 100,000 users and dozens of apps have used it already.
- "you get .0002% shares over 4y, 90 days to exercise, 409a is still being decided. we're totally 5x more valuable than our last round. no, i can't share our cap table, revenue or outstanding shares." "... no thanks, i'm joining this web3 company instead" "goddamn ponzi schemes"
- If we asked people to subscribe with credit cards, we'd lose $45,000 in fees. We used USDC on Base and paid ~$10.10,000 subscribers in the less than 6 hours!
- my solidity files: 10% actual code, 90% comments rationalizing the horrible, horrible things i'm about to do with the bits to save gas
- Snapchain testnet is now live. All Farcaster data is being streamed into Snapchain in parallel and things are working smoothly. A team of 3 engineers went from problem statement to working, novel blockchain design in 6 months. I think this might be a new record.
- Our plan is to scale Farcaster to 1 million daily users. The network must handle 10,000 transactions per second while staying credibly decentralized. That's the same order of magnitude as Visa.
- After 4 and a half years, today is my last day @coinbase. Very fortunate to have learned from the smartest and kindest folks in crypto through some crazy times in the industry.
- Ideas for building sufficiently decentralized social networks
- Farcaster users are very onchain. We're seeing almost 2 transactions every second from user wallets in the app. Most of this is happening on Base, with a growing amount on Solana. This is particularly impressive once you realize that we only have 37 users.
- Announcing Farcaster Labels Labels are an open standard for adding context to accounts and casts. Any developer can provide a labelling service to other Farcaster or Ethereum apps. We're releasing Warpcast's spam labels, which will tell you if an account is spammy or not.
- 2025 priorities for Farcaster. A lot of interesting things are going to be built onchain soon. Farcaster should be the programmable and credibly neutral social network that connects users, developers and blockchains. But what does this mean tangibly?
- Using Farcaster is good for Ethereum
- Kind of crazy that we’re 10 years into Ethereum and it’s still next to impossible to tell if an address is likely to be a high quality user for your app with an api call.
