Logos Circle Rome #3

deca12x · May 5, 2026, 5:44pm

Logos Circle Rome: Farcon Edition

Date: Sunday, May 3, 2026

Location: Urbe Hub, Rome, Italy

Registered on Luma: 36

Attended IRL: 24

Languages: English

Circle Steward: Deca

Context

Urbe is a well-known group of Web3 builders and event organisers: countless onboarding and development activities for the crypto commons (bootcamps, hackathons, conferences) and is now organising the annual Farcaster conference.

In this context, we are drawing our attention to the Why (the very essence) of the Farcaster ecosystem: The social media problem, pervasive extractive algorithm, the ‘enshittification’ of online services - specifically organising two Logos Circles, with a partly novel approach.

Last month (April 8th) we had an Online Circle “Road to Farcon”, for community members deeply embedded in the Farcaster ecosystem, to lay the stage for the in-person meetup in Rome.
Now we held the culmination - an IRL Circle “Farcon Edition” as a Farcon side-event, attended by some of the key people active in the ecosystem.

Participants

Largely similar audience to the previous month (but this time they are all here in Rome!). Key members of Farcaster, Neynar (company who owns the IP connected to Farcaster), members from adjacent communities that are very active on Farcaster, including Nouns, Kismet Casa and Base House, Builders Garden, Urbe of course … Also, Sterlin from the Logos Movement Team.

Event Structure & Topics Discussed

Start Time: 11:30 End Time: 14:00

Setting the Stage - I shared some key threads to help people understand:

Welcome - I introduced people to Logos Circles, spoke on the value-alignment between Logos and Farcaster, making the case for this overlap of communities, I gave a recap of the previous April 8th Circle, Described our winnable issue (below) and then introduced @Sklujan who gave a great overview of our self-sovereign ideals and passive-freedom-enabling values.

Introductions - Everyone in the circle shared their name, where they came from and what brought them to Farcon.

Winnable Issue - To maximise Farcon Rome 2026 as a moment of reflection and alignment of the Farcaster vision and values… How should we shape Farcaster going forward, as a community? To CROPS or not to CROPS? Snapchain or Hypersnap?

Hotbeds of Conversation - The conversation touched on several critical topics for this inflection-point in the protocol and ecosystem’s existence:

We started focusing on the debate of Snapchain or Hypersnap - this is where Farcaster posts, comments, images, likes live. Snapchain has permissioned validators, only 8 validators, 6 of whom are controlled by Neynar (company). Neynar has shown us their real intention to decentralize, by allowing Hypersnap (a community initiative) to emerge and committing to synchronizing the two. Both sit on bespoke blockchain-adject type networks. Hypersnap involves a token. There were many points of contention here mostly surrounding ideal incentive design, ongoing development of Hypersnap and the wider topic of whether to prioritize growth/sustainability/survival or principles/decentralisation/openness - in other words, to CROPS or not to CROPS.
The conversation evolved into the relevance of governance and community power - e.g. Hypersnap = community effort. Farcon = community effort. The architecture of the Farcaster core protocol is such that layer zero will always be the community.
The third distinct point was about the content economy - Base, Zora had been promoting content coins and creator coins - commercializing every creator action - marketing this as a moral stance to support artists and creators over middlemen. Many community members feel betrayed by these platforms’ ability to capture huge amounts of fees for many months, warp the incentive surrounding the ecosystem’s art scene, then promptly leave at first sight of the bear market. We discussed the implicit incentives generated surrounding content tokens vs ERC20 tokens or other forms, such as a hypothetical content token without a sell function in the smart contract (i.e. liquid streamed sell over time).
We also talked about the big UX fragmentation problem of crypto from the distinct perspective of Farcaster - fragmented chains, wallets, liquidity, identity… Some participants voiced the opinion that embedded wallets like Privy, Dynamic, Thirdweb, solved one problem (onboarding through social login) by exacerbating another (fragmentation of onchain identity).

Outcomes

The conversation felt empowering and dearly needed by many participants, several of whom came up to me after the circle to tell me this explicitly, and to thank me for hosting the circle. All of these conversations were in key people’s mind-spaces and their thoughts spilled over into Farcon the following two days.
I personally collected all of the information and talked 1on1 with Rish (Cofounder of Neynar, currently in charge of the Farcaster protocol) during Farcon, conveying the community’s views collected. I will also send him this forum post.
We validated this new form of Logos Circle, aimed at a wider-than-local problem, harnessing a live international community gathering to help them reason on the things that matter and not lose sight of their core mission.
We had a lovely barbeque on the Urbe Hub’s terrace basking in Roman Spring weather .

The Next Chapter of Logos Rome Circle

IMO we have validated that this new format of Logos Circles have huge value and we have brought Logos together with a key value-overlapping ecosystem - aiming at a wider-than-local problem, harnessing a live international community gathering to help them reason on the things that matter and not lose sight of their core mission.

Urbe is an incredibly resourceful group of builders and doers. Urbe is very principled in always adhering to its values (e.g. not accepting money from unaligned entities). We will keep on building and supporting ecosystems and project we believe in - we would love to have the continued support of Logos to run Circles that help ground ecosystem members and remember their Why.

here is Rish elaborating on his Why - building things that are both Good and Useful

Thanks for reading, Deca https://linktr.ee/deca12x