Every Farcaster user must accept a “social smart contract” or lose the ability to post, under new rules that came with the platform’s sale to Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School.
Srinivasan’s Network School acquired the Farcaster app, protocol repositories and related products from infrastructure firm Neynar, Neynar co-founder Rish announced in a post on Farcaster on October 15. Financial terms were not disclosed. Rish wrote that “Farcaster needs a different operating model for its next stage” , and said Neynar weighed several other offers before the transfer. He and fellow co-founder Manan will move on, while other Neynar staff join Network School to keep building the app.
The in-app announcement renames Farcaster the “Network State Protocol,” saying it wants to “build a network of opt-in digital societies which ultimately gets printed out in the physical world” . Alongside the rebrand, existing users face a prompt to accept or decline the new behavioural contract.
Opt-ins get an access NFT confirming their choice onchain, a verifiable receipt of assent that leaves the old sign-up-and-post flow behind. Decliners keep read-only access on the main app, with their keys, funds, followers and post history moved to another client. A prompt shared by users on X asks them to “vote to stay” to preserve write access; anyone who votes to leave or abstains is left with read access only.
The contract lists what the app calls “digital felonies”: hate speech, death threats, scams, repeatedly starting fights, stalking users, and passing off AI-generated content as one’s own. The new app also plans to require human verification to cut back on bot activity and to use AI moderation, a shift from the protocol’s permissionless roots to identity-gated participation.
It is Farcaster’s second ownership change in under nine months: Neynar bought it from original developer Merkle Manufactory in January, a deal that also included token launchpad Clanker. Rish’s announcement did not say what happens to Clanker.
Some users said the new rules reached into their past. Posts on X from October 15 reported bans over posts at least three months old, including ones about Elon Musk and Flock cameras, but those reports have not been independently verified.
