We have to go back!

In 2024, Farcaster was the most decentralized it had ever been: a peer-to-peer network of hubs that were, at the protocol level, peers. My hub running on a Raspberry Pi at home, your hub on a VPS, Merkle’s hubs powering Warpcast, Neynar’s hubs powering various independent apps — they were all peers. Not equal, because network position, capacity, reliability, and importance mattered, but peers. A year later, in spring 2025, Farcaster migrated to Snapchain. Snapchain introduced globally ordered blocks, consensus, and, most importantly, higher throughput. Throughput was the weak point of the hub approach, and Snapchain fixed it in order to allow Farcaster to grow from tens of thousands of users to millions of users. But it sacrificed the one unique feature Farcaster had: decentralization. The core team’s North Star was simple: grow 1000x or die. In pursuit of high growth, they introduced a number of additional client-side features: Frames and Mini Apps, wallets, and Sign in with…