Farcaster, the most hyped web3 twitter alternative backed by a16Z and Coinbase, has finally made its blockchain, Snapchain, live on Wednesday.
Snapchain is built for decentralized social media applications built via Farcaster particularly and aims to scale and enhance its platforms.
Notably, the chain can handle 10,000 transactions per second but for transaction here implies “post”, “like”, or any action by a social user on its platforms.
Initially, it is estimated to support 2 million daily users on Farcaster’s platforms and clients – which includes famous platform Warpcast.
What’s Behind Farcaster Launching Snapchain
Farcaster is often touted as the “Ethereum for social media”. Its underlying infrastructure and identity layer for developers to build social apps that are decentralized, censorship-resistant, and user-owned.
Till now, Farcaster’s social data was being handled by the current Deltagraph system. However, it fails to sync all the real-time data of nodes.
To ensure efficient communication, each node must reach consensus about a user’s state and stay in sync with other nodes.
To solve and bring this capability, Farcaster’s new data and blockchain-like layer, Snapchain uses ordered, block‑based transaction processing to replace this existing Conflict‑Free Replicated Data Type (CRDT) network.
It groups user actions—such as posts, likes, and follows—into discrete blocks. Snapchain ensures both strong consistency and rapid finality, overcoming the synchronization challenges inherent in purely CRDT‑based systems.
How is it Optimized for Social Use‑Cases
Unlike general‑purpose blockchains, Snapchain transactions are non‑Turing complete and account‑independent.
Each transaction affects only a single user account—whether adding a post, deleting content, or updating a profile. This will help in making sharding straightforward and minimizing cross‑shard communication.
Older or negated transactions are pruned regularly, ensuring long‑term storage requirements remain modest.
Front‑end clients like Warpcast – the flagship app that offers an X‑like user interface – can immediately leverage the new data layer to improve feed loading speeds, reduce latency, and unlock novel on‑chain features.
Its developer and founder, Varun Srinivasan, revealed in a X post that over 100,000 users and dozens of apps have used it already.
Boost for the development of Web3 Social Media Apps?
Farcaster is growing at an unprecedented scale. It is leading the development of decentralized social media communication with a vision to scale it in par with existing web2 platforms like Telegram, X, Instagram.
This is evident by the Farcaster stats that have increased over the last few months. According to Dune, the monthly active users reached a 6-month high of 229k on March 7 2025. An average of 5-7.5k new users have joined per day since the start of this year, hitting a peak of 14,825 on Feb. 23.
As of January, 2025, Farcaster had nearly 800,000 unique addresses registered on the protocol, with protocol revenue totaling $2.53 million since inception
Notably, another such decentralized social media messaging platform, Towns, is also growing. It is soon to list its native $TOWNS token.
Thus, if Farcaster can deliver on its promise of high throughput, low friction, and true data ownership, Snapchain may set the standard for how decentralized social media scales to millions.
This will be an essential step toward realizing a more open, user‑controlled internet, powered by blockchain.
The post Farcaster Launches Snapchain, a Blockchain Built for Twitter‑Like Social Apps appeared first on CoinGape.
