Decentralized Social Protocol Farcaster Raises $150M in Funding Round Led by Paradigm

Decentralized social media protocol Farcaster has raised $150 million in a funding round led by Paradigm with participation from venture capital fund 16z crypto, Haun, USV, Variant, Standard Crypto and more.

Farcaster launched by former Coinbase alumni, Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, has emerged as a prominent player among several burgeoning Twitter alternatives, both on-chain and off-chain.

In March, Farcaster was on the verge of reaching a valuation of $1 billion in its latest funding round. Back then Paradigm had not officially confirmed its participation in the funding round.

In a blog post, Romero shared that since going permissionless last October, Farcaster has seen 350,000 paid sign-ups and a 50 times increase in network activity.

Excited to share the news about our recent fundraise! pic.twitter.com/KJxuPJrtqg

— Dan Romero (@dwr) May 21, 2024

Farcaster Plans in 2024

Farcaster has huge ambitions for the year ahead. Romero said there are hundreds of developers building on the protocol and a growing number of apps and frames for people to use.

The protocol will be focused on two things for the rest of the year: Growing daily active users and adding developer primitives to the protocol like channels and direct messaging.

In a separate announcement, Farcaster integrated the blockchain community Arbitrum, a layer 2 technology suite designed to scale Ethereum.

We're happy to announce @farcaster_xyz just integrated its biggest blockchain community yet; Arbitrum!

To celebrate this integration, we’re hosting:

🟪Frame It.🟪

A buildathon for developers to create Frames on Arbitrum, with $500k USD in retroactive rewards. 👇 pic.twitter.com/vYxDPWFn2p

— Arbitrum (💙,🧡) (@arbitrum) May 21, 2024

Arbitrum’s said to celebrate its integration on the decentralized centralized social protocol, the firm is hosting a “Frame It: A Buildathon” and event for developers to create Frames, with $500,000 in retroactive rewards.

This will allow users to build Frames with direct Arbitrum transaction support giving Frame builders and users direct access Arbitrum.

Farcaster’s Developer-First Ethos

This year Farcaster introduced Frames,

a feature that enables users to play games, mint non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and make purchases within the social media feed. Farcaster has experienced a significant surge in user activity since January, following the introduction of Frames.

Frames allow developers to embed interactive experiences within Farcaster posts, known as Casts. This concept quickly gained traction, thanks to the platform’s popularity among blockchain developers. Jesse Pollak, creator of Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network Base, echoed Romero’s sentiments.

The majority of Frames on the decentralized social protocol have been developed on Base, sharing a similar developer-first ethos.

Data from Dune Analytics shows the number of daily active users on the Farcaster network surged from around 5,000 on January 28 to over 249,000 on March 30.