Coinbase, the popular cryptocurrency exchange, recently announced that the Farcaster social-feed and mini-apps (called “frames”) will be coming to the Coinbase Wallet. This collaboration has the potential to transform the Coinbase Wallet into a Farcaster social-media client, and potentially bringing Farcaster to millions (if not tens-of-millions or hundreds-of-millions) more users.

If realized, this user-growth could significantly impact Farcaster, which, as of now, is the smallest among prominent decentralized social-media (DeSo) networks such as Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, and others.

Why is this happening?

While Farcaster currently appeals mostly to cryptocurrency enthusiasts, the partnership with Coinbase could signal a coming effort towards attracting non-crypto users. This could involve focusing on entertainment, influencers, or other cultural elements that appeal to the masses. Coinbase also echoed this on the 2025 roadmap they published:

We’re rebuilding Coinbase Wallet into an open platform that anyone can build and grow into, and we’re going to help builders go viral. To do this, we’re focusing on:

Helping apps get discovered. We’re adding a social graph to the Coinbase Wallet app by leveraging Farcaster, an open, social protocol that anyone can build on top of. We’ll use Farcaster to power a full social feed, as well as mini-apps with Frames v2. These are bite-sized onchain experiences — created in minutes — allowing users to take actions without leaving the feed.

In the announcement, Farcaster founder Dan Romero highlighted two key elements that will come to Coinbase Wallet:

1. Virality: the opportunity for creator content to gain massive amounts of attention without the need for an advertising model.
2. Open Social-Graph: the ability to tap into an open network of people and be part of a larger conversation.

Understanding Virality

Virality occurs when a social media post gains significant attention in a short amount of time. For example, a user with 1,000 followers might see their post engaged with by tens of thousands due to sharing and resharing across the social-network.

This phenomenon is not just about popularity; it’s a powerful marketing tool. Smaller creators or startups can use virality to gain visibility without relying on paid ads, which many people find intrusive.

Understanding the Open Social-Graph

But, what about the open social-graph? Virality happens on a social-graph — without a social-graph there is no virality. A social-graph is essentially the network of users and the connections between them. An open social-graph is one that can be accessed by anyone in an open & permissionless manner.

This is a key characteristic of all decentralized social-media (DeSo) networks — including of course Farcaster, but also includes Bluesky, the Fediverse, Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, Nostr, and many others. And, is important to developers looking to build an application or service on top of a social-network.

Why Does Coinbase Care?

While Farcaster stands to gain significant growth from this partnership, one might wonder: Why is Coinbase interested? Several factors may be at play:

• Dan Romero‘s influence: A former VP at Coinbase, Romero is well-connected within both the cryptocurrency and tech industries, providing credibility and potential leverage.
• Coinbase Mafia: Like the “PayPal Mafia,” members of the Coinbase Mafia (such as Dan Romero and his Farcaster co-founder Varun Srinivasan) hold significant sway within the cryptocurrency sector, making this partnership more strategic than purely financial.
• Onboarding mainstream users: Coinbase is focusing on onboarding the “next billion users” to cryptocurrencies. Social media is a key vector for reaching non-crypto users, and Farcaster could be instrumental in this mission.

Another consideration involves Nostr. Nostr’s network and ecosystem heavily embrace Bitcoin, and also benefit from Jack Dorsey‘s company Block. Three of Block’s companies involve Bitcoin: CashApp, Square, and Proto, while the TIDAL music platform features a Nostr integration. Given that Nostr’s community largely prefers Bitcoin, this partnership might be an attempt to steer Farcaster in a similar direction, but with Ethereum.

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