Ethereum-Based Twitter Rival Farcaster Raises $150 Million

Farcaster, the decentralized social media protocol, announced a $150 million Series A funding round on Tuesday, providing a major boost to the fast-growing network's development plans.

The funding round was led by Paradigm, with participation from investment firms including Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto fund, Haun Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Variant, and Standard Crypto, among others. Farcaster told Unchained Crypto that the raise values the startup at $1 billion, making it the latest crypto unicorn.

In a post Tuesday, Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero outlined the firm’s priorities for the newly raised capital: "We're 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."

The announcement comes on the heels of Farcaster's permissionless launch in October 2023, which opened the protocol to all developers and users. Since then, Farcaster has seen sizable growth, claiming 350,000 paid sign-ups and a 50-fold increase in network activity. The network is built on Optimism, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network.

Farcaster was founded in 2020 by a pair of Coinbase alums, Romero and Varun Srinivasan. It gained significant traction at the start of 2024 with the launch of Frames, a feature that pulls in functionality—like minting NFTs or playing games—from external apps without making the user leave the social feed.

Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Andrew Hayward.