Degen token surges 17% on Farcaster’s $150M Series A raise

Farcaster, blockchain’s answer to traditional social media, raised $150 million in a Series A funding round led by Paradigm, sending a community token soaring.

Farcaster community-created token Degen (DEGEN) jumped 17% after the blockchain-based social platform confirmed it raised $150 million in its latest funding round.

The Series A round was led by venture firm Paradigm with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Haun, USV, Variant and Standard Crypto. Farcaster founder Dan Romero said in a May 21 X post the funds will “support our work on Farcaster for many years.”

Romero, a former Coinbase executive, first hinted at the funding round on Warpcast in March but didn’t share any further details at the time.

Bloomberg reported in March that the funding round would lift the valuation of Merkle Manufactory — the company behind the social network Farcaster — to $1 billion.

“Farcaster is a fledging but quickly growing protocol,” Variant Fund’s co-founder and general partner Jesse Walden wrote in a May 21 statement. 

Meanwhile, Romero said the raise will help the protocol attract more users. He said since October, Farcaster had “350,000 paid sign-ups and a 50x increase in network activity.”

He added the platform will be focused on growing daily active users and adding “developer primitives” to the protocol, such as channels and direct messaging.

Related: Farcaster sees 400% increase in daily active users amid ‘frames’ frenzy

DEGEN, a Farcaster community-created token and not an official token of the protocol, rocketed 17% on the news and is currently trading at $0.023, according to CoinMarketCap.

In January, a Farcaster Degen channel frequenter, Jacek Trociński, launched DEGEN as a community memecoin, which was airdropped to users as a reward for writing good content or interacting with posts.

The token has since taken on a life of its own, leading Trociński to launch a meme coin-focused layer-3 blockchain on Base called the DEGEN chain, which uses Degen as the native gas token.