Dan Romero, founder of the decentralized Web3 social protocol Farcaster, previewed an update of Frames, which once spiked the protocol’s users by 400% in a week.
“A new Frame standard that allows interactive applications, onchain transactions, and user notifications would enable many new kinds of social applications,” Romero said, introducing the specifications for Frames v2 on X on Nov. 26.
Launched in January 2024, Farcaster Frames are one of the reasons behind the layer-2 Optimism-based protocol’s surge in popularity, as they solved some initial issues by enabling users to run small apps inside of posts on the social media application Warpcast.
Farcaster activity spiked following the launch of Frames, with a 400% increase in daily active users in early February, though it has tapered off slightly since then.
Romero said the first version of Frames had limitations with the number of interactions making larger apps impossible to build, slow generating image rendering and an “ephemeral” state preventing users from returning to them.
Example of a frame using a wallet to complete a transaction. Source: Dan Romero
He said the upgrade to Frames v2 aims to solve some of these issues by providing a more advanced frame standard that enables more flexible full-screen in-app applications, interactive experiences, onchain transactions and user notifications.
“Developers can build anything that renders in a browser and can use a frames SDK to trigger actions like saving the frame or requesting an onchain transaction,” Romero said.
“We’ve significantly improved reliability and speed for transactions and signed messages on mobile using Mobile Wallet Protocol and Rainbow,” said Romero in a separate post on Nov. 26, while linking to a Frames v2 developer preview.
The initial new specification of Frames highlighted by Romero will launch on the web and mobile on Nov. 27, followed by an updated version with more features on Dec. 6. The full stable release is expected to be launched in January or February, according to the full specification on GitHub.
Related: Paradigm’s funding takes Farcaster’s dev to unicorn status
Farcaster has about 710,000 total users and around 500,000 average casts per day, according to Dune Analytics. Still, daily active users have dropped off over the past six months, declining by about 28%.
A decline in daily active users on Farcaster. Source: Dune Analytics
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