Warpcast is the decentralized social media app that everyone’s talking about, and for good reason! Built on the Farcaster protocol, Warpcaster has been around for a while but recently saw a huge spike in interest with the innovation of Frames, a new way to interact with Web3 directly from your feed. 

The onchain capabilities of Frames has been expanding every day, with hackathons around the world spitting out new concepts like minting NFTs, in-feed shopping experiences, token swaps, claiming lottery tickets, and a whole metaverse more.

What is Farcaster?

Farcaster is a decentralized media protocol that launched in 2021. Built on top of Farcaster is an ecosystem of apps which take on incumbent media platforms like Twitter, Medium, Mailchimp, Spotify and more, in a decentralized manner. 

The Farcaster protocol is designed to allow app developers to enable their users to publish blogs, status updates, audio recordings, and newsletters that they retain control over in perpetuity.

What is Warpcast?

Warpcast is a decentralized Twitter alternative built on Farcaster, that recently exploded in popularity thanks to its innovative feature, Frames. Warpcast lets users post messages and images on a feed for others to interact with, and also uses Channels to let users post their tweet to a specific category or community for broader reach. 

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Warpcast is available both on Mobile and Desktop, and you can easily connect logins between the two using a QR code and connected wallets. 

Setting up a Warpcast account

Getting on Warpcast is fairly straightforward, if you’ve set up a crypto wallet before. You will be given a 24-word seed phrase that generates the keys to your account. When you first sign up there is a $5 fee to pay, which covers onchain platform fees. You will also need to link an email address.

Once you’ve completed the initial seed generation and account payment, you can choose a username and continue to set up your profile. Note that Warpcast usernames cannot be changed once set, so choose wisely! 

Posting a message, called a Cast, costs around $0.01, though this is covered by the initial signup allowance. Each user is allocated a limited amount of storage for 5000 casts, 2500 reactions and 2500 follows in the price. More storage can be purchased separately. 

Connecting a wallet address to Warpcast

To get the most out of Warpcast, you will want to connect a wallet address to it. This is done by opening the Settings menu and selecting Connected addresses, then clicking on Connect an address, and signing a message from your wallet. 

For your security, you should set up a new address for Warpcast and fund it with only a small amount of Ether. There are many experimental features on Warpcast and developers are testing the limits every day. One dev created a Frame explicitly stating it would drain the wallet of anyone who interacted with it, while another created SnowCrash, an NFT that makes all NFTs in an account unviewable.

Connecting and disconnecting wallets is free and only takes a few seconds, so you can change which address you use depending on what you need to do. This is quite widely exploited to get around Frame limits and repeatedly mint NFTs that are limited to one per wallet.  

Frames on Warpcast

Frames are the innovative feature that has brought hundreds of thousands of new accounts to Warpcast in recent weeks. Displayed as a slideshow with primitive buttons, users can make decisions that influence the next slide they are shown. 

Frames can check that qualifying criteria is met before allowing a user to proceed, which may  include platform-centric activity such as liking or recasting a post or following a caster, or onchain activity such as holding a particular NFT or ERC-20 token. 

Prior to launching frames, there were approximately 2,000 daily active users. Within a week, that number was 20,000, and recently approached almost 200,000 with more growth expected. The number of daily casts has been cited to have increased by more than 1000% to well over 2 million casts sent each day.

Example Frames

The pace of development of Frames makes it difficult to offer an exhaustive list of what to try. For a broad overview of what’s going on, keep an eye on the Awesome Frames Github page which attempts to track all the most interesting projects that have launched. Below are a few examples of how Frames have been used.

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BaseQuest

A choose-your-own-adventure launched by Base network that uses AI to build an in-frame fantasy world where you choose how to proceed. When you begin, you mint an NFT that records your characters progress with each decision you make. 

Farcastles

A community game with a simple premise: users attack a castle to the North or South by casting a message in the form "!attack (direction)". Scores are kept by a bot. That's it.

NFT projects

NFTs play multiple roles on Warpcast: as collectibles mintable directly from your feed, as prerequisites for interacting with frames, as redeemable objects for promo campaigns, and can even be minted based on the choices you make within a frame. 

Here are just a handful of examples: 

• MYK Bois: Create your own custom PFP (profile picture) NFT using a Frame.
• Mint A Penny: Mint an image of a penny and redeem it for a Base cap (sold out).
• Outcasts: An AI-generated manga style collection limited to 400 characters reading books.
• Ciniz: A collection of daily NFTs celebrating Warpcast meme culture.
• Red envelopes: Celebrating the Lunar New Year with Coinbase Wallet, anyone who used this frame to send a $5 USDC transaction via text message link got  an NFT.

Polls

Create a poll that users can interact with to respond, recording answers in an immutable way. 

Powerbald lottery

The Powerbald lottery lets Warpcast users mint a lottery ticket each day, for a chance to win Degen tokens.

Degen tips

Degen is a channel on Warpcast dedicated to degen culture. The Degen channel launched a token airdrop in February 2024, drawing a large wave of attention, followed by announcing a  second airdrop which is slated to come at the end of the month. 

Degen has become the most popular token on Warcast for tipping, as eligible users get a daily token allowance which they can send to other Warpcast users by commenting a number followed by $DEGEN. For example, commenting “100 $DEGEN” under a post you like will award the person 100 Degen tokens from your daily allowance.

Need Degen tokens? Get yours on Matcha!

Unused Degen tokens are destroyed if not used, incentivizing users to spend them all and helping to spread visibility of the project.

How to be eligible for Degen 

To become eligible for a daily Degen token tip allowance, you must first be active on Warpcast with a wallet connected and an account over 24 hours old and have posted at least 3 casts. There may be a delay of 24 hours before receiving your tip allowance. 

The size of your tip allocation is influenced by various factors including how your casts are received by the Warpcast audience. 

Checking your Degen tip balance

To see your current Degen daily allowance for tipping in Warpcast, you will need to visit the Airdrop page at degen.tips/airdrop2 and connect your wallet. Please note that this is a third party site and its security cannot be guaranteed. 

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Warps 

Warps are the primary currency used by Warpcast. They can be gifted to other casters by clicking on the Gift Warps button under a cast, and more recently have been leveraged to allow one-click minting through Frames. Warps are not onchain tokens and function more like points. 

Warps can be earned through being active on Warpcast and rewarded to node operators. If you need Warps but don’t qualify for any distribution, you can buy them with fiat or crypto through a link provided by a relevant Frame.

What wallet should I use for Warpcast on Mobile?

Most crypto wallets should work with Warpcast, but my personal experience has been that Rainbow wallet and Zerion are the most responsive. Coinbase Wallet is very active in the Warpcast ecosystem but the app often fails to fetch messages when switching from Warpcast to sign a transaction, and Rainbow will usually capture the transaction instead if installed alongside it.

Whichever wallet you use, it is good practice to create a new address to use for Warpcast and fund it with only the amount of crypto you plan to use. With the rising popularity of the app, there are greater incentives to find exploits or develop scams targeting users. 

Combined with the novelty and onchain capabilities of Frames, it is best to keep your main funds isolated in a hardware wallet and only connect fresh addresses to Warpcast.