Farcaster secures $150M to grow users, add tools for decentralized social media protocol

Industry heavyweights are supporting Farcaster in a big way — and the social media protocol now has an additional $150 million at its disposal. 

Paradigm led Farcaster’s latest fundraise, the startup revealed Tuesday. Other participants included a16z, Haun Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Variant and Standard Crypto.

Farcaster looks to use the $150 million in capital to grow its user base and add developer tools, according to co-founder Dan Romero.

Farcaster is the permissionless protocol behind the social network Warpcast. In January it launched a feature called Frames that allows users to embed functionality on Farcaster applications without having to leave the app.

Read more: Farcaster is marrying social media and Web3 to onboard the masses

“We didn’t know what shape it would take, but we knew it had to be sufficiently decentralized,” Romero said of Farcaster in a blog post. “We believed that if users and developers felt they were in control, they would be willing to invest their time and energy in building out the network.”

Since October, Farcaster has seen 350,000 paid sign-ups and watched its network activity increase by 50 times, the co-founder added.

Jesse Pollak, creator of Coinbase layer-2 Base, told Blockworks in February that Farcaster’s launch of Frames likely marked “an inflection point” for the space.

“We have low-cost layer-2s, managed wallets, better identity like Farcaster, and then the social graph and feed that will get us into viral consumer growth,” Pollak said at the time. “I think it’s gonna happen faster than people anticipate and make a massive impact on the world for the better by bringing people on-chain, where they’re going to have ownership of their creativity.”

Read more: Q&A: Dan Romero and Jesse Pollak think this may be Farcaster’s ‘inflection point’

The major fundraise comes as crypto fundraising has seen an uptick so far this year. 

Crypto advisory firm Architect Partners counted 444 disclosed private financings during the first three months of 2024, totaling $3.1 billion raised.

That marked a substantial quarter-over-quarter increase in both categories, with capital raised up 36% and the number of financings rising by 77%.

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