Farcaster accused of bot manipulation receives harsh criticism from Ethereum team lead
Péter Szilágyi, the team lead of Ethereum, has expressed his discontent with Farcaster, an open-source decentralized social network, accusing the platform of engaging in bot manipulation and raising concerns about its transparency.
Szilágyi recently voiced his doubts about the integrity of Farcaster’s ecosystem, citing instances where bots allegedly dominate user activity by engaging in transactions to accumulate DEGEN, an unofficial token created to increase engagement in the Farcaster community.
He further claims that there is an “insane conflict of interest” for the network developers not to address this issue, as non-power users (those with less than 400 followers) are automatically filtered out from everyone’s feed. He compares the current state of the project to a “money and user printer.”
Farcaster has not made any public statements regarding these allegations at the time of writing. Crypto.news has reached out to the project for a response and will update the article accordingly.
This is not the first time Szilágyi has expressed concerns about Farcaster’s transparency. In February, he questioned the platform’s “organic growth” in a post, noting that his own account on Farcaster experienced a tenfold increase in a matter of days without any activity.
Farcaster, founded in 2020, is a decentralized social network similar to X but built on Optimism, a layer-2 solution for Ethereum. Reports emerged in late March suggesting that Merkle Manufactory, the company behind Farcaster, was close to securing a significant funding round led by Paradigm, valuing the company at around $1 billion. In July 2022, the firm successfully raised $30 million in a funding round led by a16z crypto.
To learn more about Farcaster and the reasons behind the excitement surrounding it, click here.
