A former executive from top US crypto exchange Coinbase has raised funds for a new decentralized social network protocol.
In an announcement on his website, former Coinbase vice president Dan Romero says that Farcaster, a protocol for building social networks, has secured funding from a series of venture capitalists.
According to the announcement, the $30 million funding round was led by a16 Crypto, Andressen Horowitz’s crypto arm with over $4.5 billion in assets, as of May.
“Our goal was to build a credibly-neutral protocol where users have direct relationships with their audiences and developers have the freedom to permissionlessly build new clients. We went through a few iterations and ultimately built Farcaster, a sufficiently decentralized protocol for building social networks.
According to the startup’s documents, anyone can broadcast short text messages on the network and connect their Ethereum address. Verifying ownership of an ETH address enables features like showcasing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and using them as your profile picture.
“Farcaster is a skin-in-the-game social network that’s not just about what you say but also about what you can prove on-chain.
Anyone can build a client application to broadcast messages on the Farcaster network. We have a tutorial that will show you how to build a simple app to read messages from any user. We’re also building the first client application to make it easy for people to get started, which is in beta.”
Industry giants have slowly begun the process of merging crypto and blockchain technology with social media.
Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya is a vocal backer of Decentralized Social (DeSo), formerly known as BitClout.
The Social Capital CEO mentioned DeSo back in October as part of his basket of investments to hedge against inflation.
“I’m very concerned about medium-term inflation… I want to own three things: hypergrowth [firms]… cash-generative assets… and then I want to own non-correlated assets: Bitcoin, Solana, DeSo, a lot of the DeFi [decentralized finance] protocols because it’s a great counter-intuitive hedge…”
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