Community Trust ScoreVerified
Farcaster got acquired. Rebranded. And a chunk of its user base got locked out almost immediately.
Why It Matters
The backlash against Network School's acquisition of Farcaster highlights the fragility of user trust in decentralized platforms, particularly during significant transitions. As the social media landscape continues to evolve, the ability to maintain user engagement and prevent alienation will be crucial for the success of new models like the Network State Protocol. This situation underscores the challenges faced by developers in balancing innovation with user experience, especially in a market rapidly shifting towards community-driven platforms.
Network School, led by Balaji Srinivasan, bought the decentralized social platform and relaunched it as the Network State Protocol. The pitch is a curated online community for techno-optimists — kind of a Singapore of social media, per Srinivasan’s own framing. But the rollout didn’t go smoothly. Accounts started getting flipped to “read-only” status, users complained loudly, and the backlash hit fast. Kunal Gandhi, former India ecosystem lead at Eigen Labs, pushed back publicly, saying the move contradicts the decentralized ethos the platform was built on. Hard to argue with that read.
Bans, Felonies, and a Social Smart Contract
The new regime runs on something called a “social smart contract.” Users have to agree to it. And if they don’t — or if their past posts run afoul of the new rules — Network School can restrict or ban them. That’s not a hypothetical. It already happened.
Violations get sorted into three buckets: digital felonies, misdemeanors, or infractions. Penalties range from warnings all the way up to permanent bans. Past posts aren’t exempt either, which is probably the part that stung most for longtime users who thought they were operating under a different set of expectations. The platform does promise rewards for positive contributions — teaching, civil disagreement, that kind of thing — but the specifics on what those rewards actually look like? Vague. No details yet.
Enforcement uses both AI and human oversight. The AI piece is interesting: the system is supposed to warn users about potential rule violations before they even post. Catch it before it goes live, rather than punish after the fact. There’s also an appeals process, though how robust that is in practice remains unclear.
And yet, Srinivasan is adamant the underlying Farcaster protocol stays open. Users keep their data. They keep their followers and post history. If they don’t like the direction things are going, they can migrate to a different client without losing everything. That’s a meaningful carve-out, and it’s probably the reason this doesn’t look like a total betrayal of decentralization — at least on paper.
250,000 Monthly Users, One Very Big Pivot
Dan Romero, one of Farcaster’s original co-founders, put the platform’s monthly active user count at 250,000 as of December 2025. That’s the base Network School inherited. And those 250,000 people are now operating under a fundamentally different set of rules than what they signed up for.
The platform changed hands earlier in the year before Network School came in, so this isn’t the first transition the community has navigated. But it’s probably the most jarring. Earlier ownership changes didn’t come with a classification system for digital crimes.
Srinivasan’s broader vision goes well past social media. The plan, as he’s laid it out, is for the online community to grow into physical meetups, then startup cities, then full network states. Digital-to-physical, basically. It’s ambitious. It’s also pretty on-brand for someone who’s been writing about network states for years.
Kazakhstan Campus, Malaysia Setback
Network School’s path here wasn’t clean. The organization had its business license revoked in Malaysia — a real setback for a group trying to build credibility around the concept of alternative governance structures. But Srinivasan isn’t pulling back. Plans for a campus in Kazakhstan are moving forward, which is the clearest signal yet that the physical-world ambitions are serious, not just rhetoric.
The Malaysia situation doesn’t get a lot of airtime in Network School’s own communications, but it’s sitting there in the background. Building a new kind of jurisdiction-agnostic community is a lot harder when the jurisdictions you’re actually operating in push back.
Back on the platform side, Srinivasan frames the moderation approach as mirroring how social norms worked before the internet — where behavior had real consequences and community standards weren’t just suggestions. Whether that framing lands with a user base that chose Farcaster specifically because it wasn’t like that is a different question.
The “decentralized democracy” framing Network School uses is meant to address the tension directly. Users can engage on their own terms. They can leave. They can build competing clients. Their followers and content stay with them. So the argument is: it’s not a walled garden, it’s a curated layer on top of an open protocol.
But Gandhi’s criticism isn’t going away. And it’s not just him — the read-only account wave hit enough people that the backlash became its own story within hours of the acquisition going public.
Farcaster had 250,000 monthly active users. Network School now has to figure out how many of them stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many users did Farcaster have when Network School acquired it?
Farcaster had 250,000 monthly active users as of December 2025, per co-founder Dan Romero.
Can users keep their data if they leave the Network State Protocol?
Yes — Srinivasan said users retain their digital assets, followers, and post history even if they opt out of the new agreement and migrate to a different client.
