Péter Szilágyi, the lead of Ethereum’s team, has publicly criticized Farcaster for suspected bot manipulation, highlighting concerns about the platform’s lack of transparency.
Szilágyi, a core developer of Ethereum, has raised doubts about Farcaster, an open-source decentralized social network, suggesting that the platform may be plagued by bot manipulation.
In a recent discussion thread, Szilágyi expressed his doubts about the integrity of Farcaster’s ecosystem, pointing to instances where bots appear to dominate user activity by engaging in transactions to earn DEGEN, an unofficial token designed to stimulate engagement within the Farcaster community.
According to Szilágyi, there is a significant conflict of interest for the network developers in failing to address this issue, as non-power users (those with less than 400 followers) are automatically excluded from everyone’s feed. He also commented that the current state of the project seems to be more focused on generating money and users rather than fostering genuine interaction.
At the time of writing, Farcaster has not issued any public statements regarding these allegations. Crypto.news has reached out to the project for comment and will update the article accordingly.
This is not the first time that Szilágyi has raised concerns about the transparency of the network. Back in February, he questioned the “organic growth” of Farcaster in a post, noting that his account on the platform had seen a tenfold increase in followers in just a few days despite minimal activity.
Established in 2020, Farcaster is a decentralized social network similar to X but built on Optimism, a layer-2 solution for Ethereum. Recent reports have suggested that Merkle Manufactory, the company behind Farcaster, is in the process of securing a significant funding round led by Paradigm, with the company’s valuation estimated at around $1 billion. In July 2022, the company successfully raised $30 million in a funding round led by a16z crypto.
To learn more about Farcaster and the reasons for the excitement surrounding it, click here.