You probably already know Farcaster, a social protocol built with crypto primitives, which raised 150 million dollars led by a16z in May 2024. I already wrote about Farcaster in Feb. 2025.

As a reminder, Farcaster was founded by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, both ex-Coinbase, who envisioned an open protocol for social networking where your graph lives onchain and developers can build innovative mini-apps, protocols, and tokenized features. I’ve been an early Farcaster user since mid 2023.

Meanwhile, Base (Coinbase’s L2 on ethereum led by Jesse Pollak) is pushing out the Base app with its “Everyone is a creator” vision. As Switzerland Ambassador for Base, I see creator coins and direct audience ownership taking hold and driving new entrepreneurial energy.

Something unique is happening on Farcaster right now, something no NFT cycle has accomplished before, not even the 2021 boom: the rise mini-app-powered social collectibles, as the Warplets Collection rightly illustrates.

The Warplets, crafted by Sayangel (Harmonybot’s founder), are more than just another PFP or tradable art token. Each Warplet leverages the Farcaster social graph, generating a digital portrait based on the user’s onchain identity. Imagine a collectible not only forged by wallet, but also coded with the messy, creative DNA of community participation and personal social graph data. It’s participatory art at protocol scale, each Warplet both artifact and avatar, algorithmically customized and ever-evolving. For the moment, the Warplets only explore a tiny percentage of what the social graph proposes but we can expect builders to soon envision multi-variate criteria to deliver deep, ultra-personalized, onchain experiences.

What does this mean for adoption? It looks increasingly like we are witnessing a tipping point:

• In the past 18 hours alone (as of Oct 28), Farcaster saw more new Pro sign-ups than it did for the entire limited edition NFT Pro launch in May 2025—bringing the onchain Pro subscriber base close to 30,000.

• Over 5,800 dormant accounts reactivated on Oct 28, the highest daily reactivation count in over 6 months.

More data about the Warplets here.

All of this is happening onchain, sparked by collective participation and the emergence of new forms of digital self-expression.

Again, this is not just another NFT. Mini-apps on Farcaster (also available on the Base app) are redefining what collectibles can be, not as static assets, but as dynamic, social, composable experiences personalized directly from the user’s evolving onchain identity and graph. The NFT is not the endpoint, but a starting point for participatory digital culture.​

At the same time, going back to the Base app, it integrates Farcaster’s protocol for social graph management. So the two ecosystems remain tightly coupled at the foundation, even while offering distinctive cultural and economic models.

Farcaster champions “developer coins” and protocol legos; Base is building for “creator coins” and scalable entrepreneurship. Both visions can thrive alongside each other, Farcaster with the deepest onchain social primitives, the Base app as the mainstream onramp for creators.

If both succeed, they won’t just coexist, they will expand the pie, creating new, fairer networks for ownership and participation.

But risks remain: overlapping narratives and fast tactical pivots could confuse and slow down user adoption. As networks mature, clear communication and cultural coherence become even more critical.

For now, Farcaster’s latest surge, and the “Warplet-initiated” phenomenon, suggest that real personalization and creative agency on the social graph are finally bringing web3’s promises to life.

That’s why I’m active on Farcaster and proud to serve as Base Ambassador in Switzerland: continuing to build the connective tissue between protocols, creators, and communities.

Best, Raph