Let’s start by looking at what we got done over the last six months relative to what we planned.
Farcaster: We shipped the identity contracts and added four significant contributors to the protocol. On the other hand, Hubs were delayed due to hard problems like pruned sets and decentralizing the follow graph.
Merkle: We grew DAU’s consistently by 5% each week, shipped encrypted direct casts on mobile, an android beta and a hosted v2 API for developers. We didn’t launch our web app or the referral system, and we had issues with the reliability of direct casts.
In summary, we scored a 4/5 — got the important things right (growing the user base + team, decentralizing identity) but dropped the ball on shipping on time and reliably (decentralizing storage, dm reliability, api readiness). We plan to get better at identifying complexity early and doing more upfront work and testing to avoid delays and reliability issues.
For Farcaster, the most important short term goal is to achieve credible neutrality in the eyes of developers. They must be able to build a client that reads and writes to the network without relying on a third party.
For Merkle, the primary focus is growing daily active users. Consistent, week-over-week growth is one of the hardest things to get right in a social network. Achieving this means that we’re building something that people want and growing the pie for other developers on Farcaster.
Our big targets for the next 6 months are: