Ethereum Co-founder Vitalik Buterin Responds to Criticism of Farcaster

According to PANews, Web3 critic Liron Shapira recently published an article on X platform, stating that Farcaster, a Web3 social media platform, superficially promotes blockchain technology but only uses it for username allocation, which is a worse implementation of what DNS and email addresses have already achieved. Shapira added that 99% of the technology they are building is non-blockchain and is an interesting experiment aimed at exploring whether adding more features to RSS can drive new product development. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded, saying that individual messages, or 'casts,' are published on the Farcaster chain, making it possible to create an independent client and benefiting from having a state machine not controlled by a single organization. Shapira continued, stating that Farcaster's information is stored in central nodes without using blockchain technology, similar to the backend functionality of many RSS reader applications as 'RSS central nodes.' He believes that promoting Farcaster as a blockchain use case is insincere. Buterin commented that this is worth responding to and has asked the team to verify some information. He previously thought that requests would be stored in a large blockchain, like a simplified version of Filecoin, but in reality, they are stored in CRDTs, which aim to achieve eventual consistency on message sets but trust the timestamps provided by senders for better scalability. The only 'chain' Farcaster uses is Ethereum (through Optimism). Ethereum's purpose is 'not just for usernames,' but also stores registration information for accounts allowed to send messages stored by CRDT nodes. This is crucial for anti-spam; otherwise, everyone would use it to back up their encrypted hard drives, movies, etc. Putting the registry on the chain is the only way to ensure it is not controlled by a centralized entity and has resistance to Sybil attacks. Therefore, the registry plays a key role in meeting Farcaster's underlying network goals of being a robust, neutral tool without ongoing reliance on a single entity. Technically, this could also be achieved with proof of work, but it would be inefficient and, in practice, centralized entities have too many efficiency advantages in front of regular users on mobile phones and laptops.

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