The Rise of Pseudonymous Social Networks: From Sealcaster to Rumourcast

From the anonymous authors of The Federalist Papers laying the foundation for democratic debate to whistleblowers exposing global injustices such as WikiLeaks, the practice of pseudonymity has enabled people to freely share ideas and truths without fear of retaliation.

Throughout history, people have used pseudonyms to freely share ideas and truths without fear of retaliation. From the anonymous authors of The Federalist Papers laying the foundation for democratic debate to whistleblowers exposing global injustices such as WikiPointless, the practice of pseudonymity has enabled the spread of important information. Voltaire, Publius, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Satoshi Nakamoto, and many others promoted the dissemination of ideas through pseudonyms.

Now, a new wave of technology is emerging to enhance privacy protection capabilities in decentralized social networks. Sealcaster, an application built on the Farcaster protocol by Big Whale Labs, is at the forefront of this development. Its development team includes Nikita Kolmogorov (borodutch), Jason Kim, and other members. They use Circom (a programming language designed for zero-knowledge circuits) to generate proofs, allowing users to complete identity verification without revealing personal information. Through Circom's constraints and signaling mechanisms, Sealcaster is able to verify the authenticity of its credentials while protecting user privacy.

Sealcaster is one of several zero-knowledge products launched by Big Whale Labs, including:

As one of the first practical zero-knowledge projects on the Farcaster protocol, Sealcaster demonstrates the great potential of privacy protection and verifiable communications on decentralized platforms.

Superanon

As the Farcaster community continued to grow, an advanced user client called supercast (developed by its founder woj and later renamed super) gradually formed a user group and gave rise to superanon.

Supercast is a paid client that is mainly for advanced users. It supports posting content from multiple accounts and allows users to operate anonymously using superanon.

ANON

In the Farcaster community, the AI-driven token launcher CLANKER has facilitated the creation of more than 10,000 tokens, with a cumulative transaction volume of $1 billion and millions of dollars paid to creators. One day, a superanon user used CLANKER to anonymously create a token called $ANON while woj was sleeping, reflecting the characteristics of permissionless operation.

When Woj woke up, he officially launched $anon Token (no capitalization) as a support tool for the superanon account and distributed the donated $ANON to all supercast users via airdrops.

Subsequently, developer slokh (who previously developed the nook client) built a platform called anoncast.org, which allows users to post content anonymously as long as they have $ANON.

The platform combines Noir and Rust technologies, and its open source code has attracted many developers to iterate and experiment, opening up new possibilities for the future of anonymous social networks.

In addition to constant feature updates and optimizations, such as allowing users to reveal that they are the author of a popular content at a later time, Farcaster's features have also attracted many well-known users, including Vitalik and Jesse Pollack. It is worth mentioning that 0xLuo is the creator of the feature on the right.

33Bits

33bits.xyz was an experimental platform that was limited to users with FID numbers below 20,000, which were early adopters of Farcaster. The tool was built by developers Kugusha and Sergey. To expand access, they later launched 66bits.xyz, which not only provided access to more users but also added additional features for token holders.

Rumours

Developed by Disky and Leovido, rumourcast.xyz is a Farcaster protocol based client that is based on the popular Anon Cast but adds some unique innovations.

As long as users hold enough supporting tokens, they can publish content as anonymous accounts. Future development plans include:

Frames V2 integration: Enhance the user interaction experience by creating unique frame functions.

NFT Minting: Supports the casting of rumor content into collectible NFTs, and may be combined with prediction market functions to add more interactivity and value to the content.

RumourAI Agent: Uses AI technology to expand and optimize rumor content, adding more depth and creativity to each release.

The iteration of these functions is ongoing and the future is worth looking forward to.

Pseudonym Economy

A wholesale shift to a completely financialized pseudonymous framework risks ignoring the complexity of human social interactions. However, the real potential lies not in absolute anonymity but in building diverse and complex identity models.

These online and on-chain social experiments provide users with a special space where individuals can build reputations, share insights, and collaborate without revealing their true identities, thereby alleviating the pressure of exposing personal information.

Although a completely anonymous model is difficult to support complex social or governance structures, these verified digital identity models offer new possibilities. These identities can be trusted and used across platforms while protecting personal privacy, paving the way for establishing an online social environment with voluntary participation and flexible identity flow, and redefining the power relations of online communication.

With these tools, we can better find the