The funding round that particularly piqued my interest in the last two weeks was Farcaster. The decentralized social networking protocol raised this year's second-biggest funding round in the crypto industry — a $150 million Series A at a reported $1 billion valuation — following Monad's $225 million fundraising in April. Such significant rounds at unicorn valuations are not so common in crypto. So what's special about Farcaster and why are investors bullish on it?
Farcaster was founded in 2020 by two former Coinbase executives Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan. They also developed an app called Warpcast on top of Farcaster, which feels mostly like X (formerly Twitter), with some additional crypto features.
Farcaster has a crypto-centric audience, largely dogfooded by Warpcast. It currently has 444,409 total users, but the protocol ultimately aims to reach a billion-plus people.
When I spoke to Farcaster's investors to find out why they backed the protocol, they explained it was partly due to the founders, its focus on building up regular quality active users and its developer-focused approach.
Such investors are also doubling down on their investments by backing startups built on Farcaster. Variant, for example, has backed Farcaster clients or apps Nook and Kiosk and Farcaster-native gaming platform Farworld Labs. "Supporting early-stage teams goes hand-in-hand with supporting Farcaster: protocols succeed when third-party businesses can sustainably be built on top," Variant's Jesse Walden and Alana Levin wrote recently. "The more teams working to onboard new users, the better."
Linda Xie, an early investor in Farcaster through her previous venture firm Scalar Capital, told me that a major reason she left Scalar Capital to work full-time on a Farcaster-based project was the protocol's permissionless and product-led development approach. Xie is currently working on Bountycaster, a platform that allows Farcaster users to post and discover bounties or services.
Farcaster's focus on developers and quality users appears to have attracted investor interest. This could create a cycle where developers build cool apps, attract users, and then bring in more developers and more users. While Warpcast currently resembles Twitter, the underlying protocol itself could further inspire apps like TikTok or entirely new social networks. That's if it catches on.
But will Farcaster be able to reach non-crypto and mainstream audiences? "It's still way too early to say," a crypto founder and active user of Warpcast told me. "It'd be like asking if Facebook could scale when it was still focused on colleges."
While Xie is an investor in Farcaster and building a product on top of the protocol, she acknowledges that Farcaster could face challenges when it comes to growing its user base beyond crypto-centric audience as well as preventing spam bots on its apps.
"I think the challenging aspects for Farcaster are going to be scaling beyond the crypto community and having clients built on top handle spam," she said, adding, "Spam is a challenging problem for any social media platform but I think something like Farcaster's power badge is a step in the right direction."
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