Farcaster community-created Degen (DEGEN) token jumped 17% after platform confirmation
The community-created Degen (DEGEN) token Farcaster surged 17% after the blockchain-based social platform confirmed it had raised $150 million in its latest funding round.
The Series A round was led by investment firm Paradigm, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Haun, USV, Variant and Standard Crypto. The funds “will support our work at Farcaster for many years to come,” Farcaster founder Dan Romero said in a May 21 post.
Romero, the former CEO of Coinbase, first hinted at the funding round on Warpcast in March, but shared no further details at the time.
Bloomberg reported in March that the funding round would bring the valuation of Merkle Manufactory – the company behind social network Farcaster – to $1 billion.
“Farcaster is an emerging but rapidly growing protocol,” wrote Jesse Walden, co-founder and general partner of Variant Fund, in a May 21 statement.
Meanwhile, Romero said the increase would help the protocol attract more users. Since October, Farcaster has seen “350,000 paid subscriptions and a 50-fold increase in network activity,” he said.
He added that the platform will focus on increasing the number of daily active users and adding “development primitives” to the protocol, such as channels and direct messaging.
about: Farcaster sees 400% increase in daily active users amid ‘executive’ craze.
DEGEN, a token created by the Farcaster community and not an official token of the protocol, rose 17% following the news and is currently trading at $0.023, according to CoinMarketCap.
In January, Jacek Trociński, one of the leaders of the Farcaster Degen channel, launched DEGEN as a community memecoin, which was distributed to users as a reward for writing good content or interacting with posts.
Since then, the token has taken on a life of its own, prompting Trociński to launch a coin-focused layer 3 blockchain on a foundation called the DEGEN chain, which uses Degen as its native gas token.
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