Farcaster developer eyes unicorn valuation as user activity surges: Bloomberg
As groundbreaking Web3 social media service Farcaster sees increasingly higher day-to-day activity, its developers are reportedly looking for new capital.
Merkle Manufactory, the Web3 social media company behind the Farcaster social network and Warpcast client, is nearing completion of a funding round led by cryptocurrency VC Paradigm that will value the company at over $1 billion, giving the company unicorn status, a report said. . Bloomberg.
Running on Ethereum and the OP mainnet as well as Farcaster’s peer-to-peer server off-chain system called Hub, Farcaster has attracted tens of thousands of users, including some of the biggest names in the cryptocurrency world. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has been active on the network, saying it is “better in many ways” than X.
In fact, according to The Block’s data dashboard, daily posts and reactions to Farcaster, known as casts, have nearly doubled in the past week to an all-time high. The peak in activity comes sometime after daily active users peaked in early February when the framing feature was introduced, suggesting that users who had been trying out the network and sticking around have become more active.
Farcaster currently sees significantly more daily activity than its Web3 social network competitor FriendTech, but FriendTech has proven to be much more profitable. Developers have earned more than $28 million in cumulative fees since launch, compared to Farcaster’s $850,000 in revenue.
Farcaster’s most popular client, Warpcast, was also developed by the Merkle Manufactory, but as a decentralized service, other competing clients exist to interact with the Farcaster protocol. Merkle, founded by former Coinbase executives Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, last raised $30 million in July 2022 in a round led by the a16z cryptocurrency.
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