The far.quest L2 - The First Farcaster Layer 2

The far.quest L2 is the first Farcaster Layer 2 that allows users to submit Farcaster messages directly to a federated, open-source superhub - bypassing onchain storage fees or Farcaster ID fee requirements. The far.quest L2 has already done over one million messages and hosts ~60,000 .cast handles that can submit messages external to the Farcaster network - saving users tens of thousands of dollars of FID/storage fees. The far.quest L2 APIs also supports directly submitting messages to Farcaster through a hosted hub if a user so chooses, making our APIs L1 + L2 agnostic. Farcaster IDs also function directly on far.quest, a perfect usecase for users saving their storage or have expired storage.

The far.quest L2 allows the opportunity for more protocol exploration, as federation allows anyone to fork an open-source repo and add new MessageTypes or other open-ended experimentation (e.g. gaming on Farcaster). far.quest can also function independently during Farcaster network outages, highly important during the widescale network outages of the first week of February 2024.

Social protocol L2s are an unexplored territory, so the evolution of far.quest L2 will be necessary - we will explore ways to checkpoint or transmit far.quest activity onto the Farcaster L1. The Farcaster L1 already deletes data through storage constraints and expiry, making proving data from the correct wallet and signer a more important constaint.

Users strongly prefer free social networks, especially when new to them, which is why Farcaster developers need to have a choice when building on Farcaster - making their onboarded users choose to pay up to $12/year or to try a far.quest L1 + L2 solution for ~39 cents a year on Optimism.

We hope the far.quest L2 encourages many more experiments on the Farcaster ecosystem. Given varying degrees of wealth globally, a major goal of far.quest was getting international users to try Farcaster without spending a large portion of their salary on something they might not like. We believe for social networks, initial growth should be prioritized, and we want many users to transition to the Farcaster L1. To give context on the success of federation, Threads is the second largest text based client with almost 100M MAU and are planning a federated approach. A Farcaster L2 like the far.quest L2 will help proliferate Farcaster.

The far.quest hub requires a Farcaster ID or a .cast handle, which is free on Ethereum and requires a small fee on Optimism, to discourage bots. Paying Ethereum gas or ~39 cents a year is a positive signal that a user is legitimate. This requirement can be changed by an operator since far.quest's L2 is open-source.

Get started today by building with our free, open-source Farcaster APIs - we have Farcaster L1 + L2 Endpoints!

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