Historically, “bots” have had a pretty bad reputation in crypto. Builders (justifiably) place a lot of value on having real, human users interacting with their products. Bots can obfuscate metrics, create spam, and in the worst cases, degrade the experience of other human users of a protocol. However, as AI has improved in capabilities, developers have built bots that can productively engage onchain (we even came up with a more pleasant term for the bots we like – we call them AI agents now).
Agents began taking off in crypto towards the end of last year - much of it was fueled by an onchain speculative mania, but that mania also pulled forward experimentation to discover valuable utility that agents could provide to users and crypto participants.
Since then, we’ve seen a variety of social and utility agents proliferate online - from trading alpha agents like aixbt, to sports betting agents like Bracky, to onchain AI assistants like Bankr and Gina.
Farcaster is uniquely positioned as the best place for builders to experiment with building onchain AI agents. Here’s why:
Permissionless access to the protocol
Building agents on X is permissioned and expensive. It requires opting into their API plans, which can cost hundreds to thousands per month depending on how often your agent is posting.
Further, X itself is a centralized organization that has full control over what exists on its platform. It has full rights to ban an account, revoke API access, or take any other actions that might limit an agents’ ability.
For developers, having a place to permissionlessly experiment with agents is existential. If you can’t ensure that your agent will always be able to use a platform, you incur a ton of risk by devoting resources to building it. Farcaster solves this: an agent can always post directly to the Farcaster protocol where no entity can censor it. Whether this means writing to the protocol directly or using managed signers like Neynar, developers can build agents with the full assurance that they won’t get banned or removed from Farcaster – and do so for much cheaper than X!
Onchain capabilities
Because accounts on Farcaster automatically have linked wallets, this vastly expands the capabilities that agents might have when interacting with accounts. At the read level, agents can understand critical context like: what tokens or NFTs a user holds, what protocols they’ve interacted with, recent trading history, and more. In terms of write capabilities, it also enables agents to send tokens, transact on behalf of users, or take other relevant onchain actions.
For example, Clanker leverages this to enable Farcaster users to capture creator fees from tokens they've launched - all it has to do is read a user's connected address and direct fees to it, without the token creator having to do anything else beyond a cast.
Farcaster also enables the agents themselves to have their own wallet - enabling them to build their own onchain balance and inventory. You can envision an agent that earns income from noice tips, or trading fees from its content coins, or has its casts collected on the Farcaster app. Maybe it also executes its own trades based on seeing what people are buying. Having a Farcaster wallet built-in to an agents’ identity turns it into an active economic participant in the ecosystem.
Public social data
Farcaster itself is a fully public graph of social data - every cast, follow, and reaction is permissionless for anyone to read, including agents. In addition to transaction history mentioned above, agents can also understand who a users’ friends are and what they’ve posted about or liked in the past. At the network level, agents can also understand what’s going on on Farcaster - Neynar AI does exactly this to answer questions around topics or themes that users are casting about.
Noicebot reads protocol data to enable incentivized campaigns - it can autonomously distribute tokens to users who follow an account because it knows their addresses and can read follow events at the protocol level.
In the coming years, AI agents are going to take over an increasingly large presence on social media as it becomes increasingly programmable. These agents won’t just be “spambots”; they’ll be real users or tools that engage in social networks alongside humans.
Today on Farcaster, agents are already often sending thousands of casts per day - many powered by Neynar - and that amount is only going to keep increasing.
If you’re a developer experimenting with building an agent, Farcaster provides the best rails for powering your agent with access to full onchain and social capabilities. At Neynar, we’re building the best tools for agents to succeed, from read APIs to signers for sending messages to token distribution.