Decentralized social network Farcaster announced Tuesday that it has raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in a Series A round. Crypto investment firm Paradigm led the funding round, which included participation from a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Variant Fund, Standard Crypto, and others.
“We’re doubling down on Farcaster in terms of our vision over the next few years to really grow this to be an internet-scale protocol,” Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero told Unchained.
Read more: Q&A With Farcaster: How Crypto Social Media Goes From 100,000 Users to One Billion
Noting that their team is currently composed of 13 people, Varun Srinivasan, Farcaster’s other co-founder, added, “Our philosophy from the beginning until now has always been to build a very lean, very efficient team.”
Since becoming permissionless in Oct. 2023, the social network has had 350,000 paid sign-ups, with a spike in activity in February prompted by the release of Frames, a feature that turns posts into interactive applications. The protocol saw further increases in daily active users in April and May, likely due to FarCon, the first conference to bring together the burgeoning community, which happened in early May.
According to a Dune Analytics dashboard created by Pixelhack, Farcaster had nearly 45,000 daily active users on a seven-day trailing average on May 20, a 30% percentage increase since Feb. 11 the height of the Frames frenzy.
Read More: Farcaster’s User Base Skyrockets Nearly 500% After Frames Launch
“We’ve also seen hundreds of developers building on Farcaster which has been a really cool milestone, so both the user and developer growth were kind of the impetus for the round,” Srinivasan said.
The recent funding announcement comes seven months after Farcaster rolled out its mainnet on layer 2 blockchain network Optimism and two years after the social network conducted its seed round in May 2022. According to Romero, Farcaster still has 80% of the funds from the original seed fundraise.
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“One thing that’s really important to Varun and myself is having a long-term mindset,” Romero said. “We feel really excited based on all the growth on both the user side and the developer side of the system and we’re using the fundraise to be able to set the company up to actually think about this on a decade-long time horizon.”
To be well-capitalized from a company standpoint allows Farcaster to continue to iterate on developer primitives such as channels and direct messaging while maintaining focus on the growing and retaining daily active users for the protocol, Romero added.
