Degen (DEGEN), a token created by the Farcaster community, rose 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 venture firm Paradigm, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Haun, USV, Variant, and Standard Crypto. Farcaster founder Dan Romero said in a May 21 post that the funding will “support our work on Farcaster for many years.”
Romero, a former Coinbase executive, first hinted at a funding round at Warpcast in March, but did not share any further details at the time.
Bloomberg reported in March that the funding round would raise the valuation of Merkle Manufactory, the company behind social network Farcaster, to $1 billion.
“Farcaster is still a nascent but rapidly growing protocol,” Jesse Walden, co-founder and general partner of Variant Fund, wrote in a May 21 statement.
Meanwhile, Romero said the increase will help the protocol attract more users. Since October, Farcaster has reached 350,000 paid subscriptions and network activity has increased 50-fold, he said.
He added that the platform will focus on growing daily active users and adding “developer fundamentals” such as channels and direct messaging to the protocol.
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DEGEN, a token created by the Farcaster community and not the protocol’s official token, rose 17% on the news and is currently trading at $0.023, according to CoinMarketCap.
Last January, Farcaster Degen channel regular Jacek Trociński launched DEGEN as a community meme coin. DEGEN was airdropped to users as a reward for writing good content or interacting with their posts.
The token has since taken on a life of its own, leading Trociński to launch a meme coin-centric layer 3 blockchain on Base called the DEGEN Chain, which uses Degen as its native gas token.
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