Farcaster's $150M Funding Round Sparks 17% Surge in Community Token DEGEN

Farcaster community-created token Degen (DEGEN) jumped 17% after the blockchain-based social platform confirmed it had closed a funding round of $150 million. Despite the Series A being led by venture firm Paradigm, several other key investors are participating in the funding round, including Andreessen Horowitz, Haun, USV, Variant, and Standard Crypto. Farcaster founder Dan Romero told X that, last month, the company's recent funding round would "support our work on Farcaster for many years."

Romero, a former executive at Coinbase, last month teased that the funding round was in the works back in March on WarpCast, though he didn't share any details at the time. A funding round for the series was first reported by Bloomberg in March, in which it said the round would lift the value of Merkle Manufactory—the company behind social network Farcaster—to $1 billion.

"Farcaster is a fledging but quickly growing protocol," wrote Variant Fund's co-founder and general partner, Jesse Walden, May 21. Meanwhile, Romero added the raise will help daily active users grow and add "developer primitives" to the protocol—such as channels and direct messaging. He said that since October, Farcaster had "350,000 paid sign-ups and a 50x increase in network activity".

Degen is a Farcaster community-created token—not an official token of the protocol. But the price of the token still shot up by 17% on the news and is trading at $0.023 according to CoinMarketCap. In January, Farcaster Degen channel frequenter Jacek Trociński launched DEGEN as a community memecoin, which is airdropped to users to write good content or interact with posts. Since then, the token has taken on a life of its own, and Trociński has gone so far as to launch his own layer-3, meme coin-focused blockchain on Base called the DEGEN chain, with Degen as the native gas token.