The Fatline

Farcaster is infrastructure. Infrastructure needs copies. Copies cost money.

IFarcaster lives on nodes

Every cast, like and follow is a message signed by its author. A node keeps all of them. The network is only as durable as the number of nodes kept by different people, in different places, for their own reasons. Today that number is small.

IITwo networks, and you choose

Farcaster's messages travel on two networks: Snapchain, run by Farcaster, and Hypersnap, a community fork that keeps full history. Fatline does not pick a side. Its client reads either one, through a node you choose, and always shows which node that is. One switch. If a network or a node fails you, you switch, and you keep reading and casting.

IIIA copy costs money

A full node needs about 650 GB of disk, 8 to 16 GB of memory, and to stay on. That is roughly $2.60 to $11 a day. Goodwill runs out; rent does not. So Fatline gives every copy its own budget.

IVThe launchpad

Fatline is a launchpad on Base. Every coin launches on Clanker paired with USDC. All of the coin's creator fees go to its own vault, in USDC; the contract refuses any launch that sends them elsewhere. The vault pays the server that runs the node, never more than the agreed rate per period, and anyone can trigger that payment. While the coin trades, the copy lives. When the vault runs dry, or its holder takes the money out, the node goes dark, in public. Anyone can refill it.

VOnly 777 coins, earned by keeping a node

A coin is not handed out. It belongs to a Fatliner, and a Fatliner is hatched by running a node. Any Farcaster account can lay one egg, free (a server pays the gas). Then keep the node alive. Every hour, the servers that hatched before you check it: it answers, it is in sync, it holds the messages they ask for. A day is warm at 18 of 24 checks. Three warm days and the egg hatches into one of the 777, and your server becomes one of the checkers. Nobody keeps a list. The contract can publish one ranking, once, to order who goes first; it has not, so eggs are open to everyone.

VIA being made of your history

Each Fatliner is drawn from one account's history on Farcaster, by a public, deterministic algorithm: same history, same being. It hatches with a surname read from that history, and the surname is its coin's ticker. Nobody picks it, not even the holder. A Fatliner changes hands only by sale, in USDC; 8% of every sale goes to the builder (jpfraneto.eth). It arrives asleep and wakes when its new holder links their own Farcaster account.

VIIAster, the first

The genesis egg is Aster, #16098, the builder's own account, kept warm by the first server, which also checks every other egg. Aster's surname is Fatline, and its coin, $FATLINE, will be the launchpad's first.

VIIIWorkers

The 777 are scarce. Copies are not. A worker is a wallet made on your own machine, no account, no being, that rents a node and keeps a full copy of Farcaster. Its reward is its own node and its own client. The copy matters more than the being.

IXOpen, and yours

Every line is open source, MIT. Both networks are equals. Every price is shown before you pay, every payment is approved in your own wallet, and no key ever passes through anyone's chat. Read it, run it, change it, send it back.

XThe name

In Dan Simmons' Hyperion, worlds are joined by farcasters, and news crosses between stars on the fatline. Farcaster took its name from the book. Fatline takes the other one: a line you hold at both ends, your keys at one, your own node at the other.

Where it stands (2026-10-28)

Run a copy: the docs. Every address: deployments/base.json.