Ethereum’s team lead Péter Szilágyi has criticized Farcaster for alleged bot manipulation, raising concerns about the platform’s transparency.
Ethereum‘s core developer Péter Szilágyi appears to be not a big fan of Farcaster, an open-source decentralized social network, implying the platform is filled with bot manipulation.
— Péter Szilágyi (karalabe.eth) (@peter_szilagyi) May 8, 2024The Farcaster DAU printer:
– Bots pay 5$ to FC to sign up.
– Bots circle-jerk to amass DEGEN tips.
– Degen tokens cover the signup fees.Rinse and repeat.
FC adds feature to hide bots. "Win-win". Users live in a bubble, FC can "demo" insane DAU. Completely healthy ecosystem /s
In a recent X thread, Szilágyi expressed skepticism about Farcaster’s ecosystem, citing instances where bots allegedly dominate user activity by circling transactions to accumulate DEGEN, an unofficial token created to boost activity in the Farcaster community.
Szilágyi alleges there’s an “insane conflict of interest” for the network developers not to fix the issue, as non-power users (those with less than 400 followers) are filtered “out by default from everyone’s feed,” adding that the current state of the project is resembling a “money and user printer.”
“IMO the biggest problem is that there’s an insane conflict of interest for the FC [Farcaster] devs to not get rid of bots. It’s a money and user printer. They just need to make them not-annoying enough to cause real users to leave.” Péter Szilágyi
As of press time, Farcaster made no public statements on the matter. Crypto.news reached out to the project and will update the article if we get any response.
— Péter Szilágyi (karalabe.eth) (@peter_szilagyi) February 5, 2024I had a farcaster account for 6 months.
On Saturday I had 250 followers. Currently I have 2700. Yep, totally organic growth…
This is not the first time Szilágyi has raised concerns about the network’s transparency. In February, the blockchain developer questioned Farcaster’s “organic growth” in an X post, saying his account on Farcaster rose tenfold in a matter of a few days with “0 activity.”
Founded in 2020, Farcaster is a decentralized social network similar to X but built on Optimism, a layer-2 solution for Ethereum. In late March, reports surfaced saying that Merkle Manufactory, the company behind Farcaster, was on the verge of securing a significant funding round led by Paradigm, valuing the company at around $1 billion. in July 2022, the firm secured $30 million in a round led by a16z crypto.