CRDT
Simplify Opportunistic Income ETF
stock NYSE ETF

hi, "some lady with huge tds" here, aka Cassie on farcaster.
It's pretty simple. I used to work for Merkle as an engineer on the dev team. I've touched every part of the app — frontends, backend, indexing glue, hubs (the first decentralization attempt) and was one of three devs that built snapchain (what syncs data between clients now).
When hubs first started, it was a small permissioned set of nodes that could write, so we could figure out all the bugs — CRDT synchronization as a protocol was a bit unusual and we had to figure a lot out. But in less than a year, we moved to full permissionless. Anyone could run a hub, hubs would sync with each other and become eventually consistent. But it had scaling issues.
So we moved on to a new protocol design to solve this. Again, the idea was to start with a small, permissioned set of peers, and find a way to make it permissionless and truly decentralized. In the last year of Merkle's reign, they were pivoting heavily because the leaders of the company no longer believed social alone was a viable strategy. Meanwhile, there was no signs of investing much more effort in making snapchain permissionless or improving it in the near term. I grew incredibly jaded, and by July of last year, i left the team. Then they pivoted into full casino mode, acquired Clanker, and hired a literal gambling addict to try to grow the degen casino types because the fees made more money than the other attempts. I was furious. I spent two and a half years of my life working towards a credibly neutral and actually decentralized (sorry, AT, but blacksky team is the proof that you're not there yet either) protocol for social.
So i started a plan to solve these problems. Dan was notorious for answering user criticism about the direction with "opportunity for another client", but the reality was, unless you either paid Neynar (who was at the time just a SaaS for farcaster api indexing/data), or you had to build your own indexing, feed generation, and other important tools needed for a basic client to function. The answer was Hypersnap, a fork of snapchain. The first iteration did only one thing different: it indexed the network data to be at parity with neynar. So instead of spending $500 a month for Neynar, you could run a node, and get the api for free. In December last year, i submitted a PR to add my own Hypersnap node as a validator. Varun agreed to do it, but said to wait until January after holiday break. Reasonable.
In the meantime, i released a farcaster mobile client, Quorum (on TestFlight and Google play). It did the things farcaster didn't or wouldn't do: E2EE DMs, group chats (in the style of discord), and supported additional networks beyond the EVM ecosystem. Mid January, I’m on GM Farcaster, live, when the interview was interrupted with the news that Neynar is buying Farcaster from Merkle. My reaction at the time was: this makes sense. They've been a long time supporter, built the first sustainable SaaS for farcaster, seemed like a good fit. After the stream, i sent a DM to Rish, one of the cofounders of neynar congratulating him and offering him help with the transition, because the tech debt and tribal knowledge was immense (none of the original fc devs came over, but apparently they do have a slack channel with them for one off questions). He said he'd get back to me. A few weeks go by, my PR to add the hypersnap node went unacknowledged, and my thought was "that makes sense, they're probably on fire right now trying to handle this".
Then they announce that a team, who was building a client in private beta (ie, you have to not only install a TestFlight, but you have to ask for an invite code), is getting their validator added. My reaction was "excuse me wtf", which they argued was no big deal, they'd add mine later. Other people also had the same "excuse me wtf" reaction, which was made worse because they clarified it was due to that team having a phone call with them, which subverted the open FIP process and had no PR or public discussion. To pile on, they also gained control of the farcaster X account, and their very first thing they posted was shilling their App Studio product. It became immediately obvious to me that the new guard was going to be even less pro-decentralization than the last, and it lit a fire under me. Rish responded in a thread that he'd add the node, then twelve hours later DMed me in the early morning that they won't be, and i should just fork.
So i announced the fork. One that is tokenized to make permissionless consensus possible, incentivized, and decentralized. Adding to it, we also built the tokenomics to reward users that help grow the network, and developers who build clients and miniapps.
Since then, a lot of the heat died down, and repeated asks for working together was given pithy answers that conflicted: "let's have a call", "I'll ask Manan (the other founder) to add your node", Manan denying this conversation happened (i had a recording and transcript), then finally, yesterday, concluded with this farcical justification, which felt especially patronizing towards one of the people that literally made what they bought: https://github.com/farcasterxyz/snapchain/pull/730
This is a fast summary, typed on my phone, there's a lot more history, but if you're interested in joining the fork, want to hear more, or want to try Quorum (or other clients moving to hypersnap like Herocast, Stupid Social, and Castora so far, others are coming), reach out! I'd post the link to the TestFlight, or Google play beta, but I’m pretty sure a brand new account on reddit sending links would probably get instanuked. So there you have it. Hope that helps.

hi, "some lady with huge tds" here, aka Cassie on farcaster.
It's pretty simple. I used to work for Merkle as an engineer on the dev team. I've touched every part of the app — frontends, backend, indexing glue, hubs (the first decentralization attempt) and was one of three devs that built snapchain (what syncs data between clients now).
When hubs first started, it was a small permissioned set of nodes that could write, so we could figure out all the bugs — CRDT synchronization as a protocol was a bit unusual and we had to figure a lot out. But in less than a year, we moved to full permissionless. Anyone could run a hub, hubs would sync with each other and become eventually consistent. But it had scaling issues.
So we moved on to a new protocol design to solve this. Again, the idea was to start with a small, permissioned set of peers, and find a way to make it permissionless and truly decentralized. In the last year of Merkle's reign, they were pivoting heavily because the leaders of the company no longer believed social alone was a viable strategy. Meanwhile, there was no signs of investing much more effort in making snapchain permissionless or improving it in the near term. I grew incredibly jaded, and by July of last year, i left the team. Then they pivoted into full casino mode, acquired Clanker, and hired a literal gambling addict to try to grow the degen casino types because the fees made more money than the other attempts. I was furious. I spent two and a half years of my life working towards a credibly neutral and actually decentralized (sorry, AT, but blacksky team is the proof that you're not there yet either) protocol for social.
So i started a plan to solve these problems. Dan was notorious for answering user criticism about the direction with "opportunity for another client", but the reality was, unless you either paid Neynar (who was at the time just a SaaS for farcaster api indexing/data), or you had to build your own indexing, feed generation, and other important tools needed for a basic client to function. The answer was Hypersnap, a fork of snapchain. The first iteration did only one thing different: it indexed the network data to be at parity with neynar. So instead of spending $500 a month for Neynar, you could run a node, and get the api for free. In December last year, i submitted a PR to add my own Hypersnap node as a validator. Varun agreed to do it, but said to wait until January after holiday break. Reasonable.
In the meantime, i released a farcaster mobile client, Quorum (on TestFlight and Google play). It did the things farcaster didn't or wouldn't do: E2EE DMs, group chats (in the style of discord), and supported additional networks beyond the EVM ecosystem. Mid January, I’m on GM Farcaster, live, when the interview was interrupted with the news that Neynar is buying Farcaster from Merkle. My reaction at the time was: this makes sense. They've been a long time supporter, built the first sustainable SaaS for farcaster, seemed like a good fit. After the stream, i sent a DM to Rish, one of the cofounders of neynar congratulating him and offering him help with the transition, because the tech debt and tribal knowledge was immense (none of the original fc devs came over, but apparently they do have a slack channel with them for one off questions). He said he'd get back to me. A few weeks go by, my PR to add the hypersnap node went unacknowledged, and my thought was "that makes sense, they're probably on fire right now trying to handle this".
Then they announce that a team, who was building a client in private beta (ie, you have to not only install a TestFlight, but you have to ask for an invite code), is getting their validator added. My reaction was "excuse me wtf", which they argued was no big deal, they'd add mine later. Other people also had the same "excuse me wtf" reaction, which was made worse because they clarified it was due to that team having a phone call with them, which subverted the open FIP process and had no PR or public discussion. To pile on, they also gained control of the farcaster X account, and their very first thing they posted was shilling their App Studio product. It became immediately obvious to me that the new guard was going to be even less pro-decentralization than the last, and it lit a fire under me. Rish responded in a thread that he'd add the node, then twelve hours later DMed me in the early morning that they won't be, and i should just fork.
So i announced the fork. One that is tokenized to make permissionless consensus possible, incentivized, and decentralized. Adding to it, we also built the tokenomics to reward users that help grow the network, and developers who build clients and miniapps.
Since then, a lot of the heat died down, and repeated asks for working together was given pithy answers that conflicted: "let's have a call", "I'll ask Manan (the other founder) to add your node", Manan denying this conversation happened (i had a recording and transcript), then finally, yesterday, concluded with this farcical justification, which felt especially patronizing towards one of the people that literally made what they bought: https://github.com/farcasterxyz/snapchain/pull/730
This is a fast summary, typed on my phone, there's a lot more history, but if you're interested in joining the fork, want to hear more, or want to try Quorum (or other clients moving to hypersnap like Herocast, Stupid Social, and Castora so far, others are coming), reach out! I'd post the link to the TestFlight, or Google play beta, but I’m pretty sure a brand new account on reddit sending links would probably get instanuked. So there you have it. Hope that helps.