Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures (USV), one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, announced on Wednesday (22nd) on the X platform that his followers can now track his account on the decentralized social protocol, Farcaster. He is currently using Farcaster to share his thoughts on technology, startups, venture capital, music, and life on the blockchain. Wilson also mentioned that, apart from being hacked last year, his X (formerly Twitter) account has been dormant for the past 18 months.
Fred Wilson also published a second article about his move from Web2 to Web3, explaining the reasons why he switched from X to Farcaster. He mentioned that USV invested in Twitter in 2007, and he served on Twitter’s board for many years and was an active user of the platform until Elon Musk acquired it in 2022. Wilson recalled what he had said at the time:
However, the developments turned out to be the opposite of what Fred Wilson expected, so he left Twitter and started using Farcaster. Wilson further stated that although Farcaster is currently relatively small with fewer than one million total users and approximately 50,000 daily active users, it possesses something that Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok do not.
Farcaster secures $150 million funding
As Fred Wilson made the above announcement, the development team behind Farcaster announced the completion of a $150 million new funding round led by renowned venture capital firm Paradigm. Other participating institutions include a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV, Variant, and Standard Crypto. Farcaster stated that this new funding will “support our work on Farcaster for many years to come.” For the remainder of the year, the company will focus on increasing the number of daily active users and adding developer primitives to the protocol, such as channels and direct messaging.
Farcaster’s features
In his latest article, Fred Wilson pointed out that Farcaster has a decentralized and open community graph and protocol, similar to early Twitter, where anyone can develop community applications on top of Farcaster, and they can interoperate with each other. Farcaster’s primary client is called Warpcast and is developed by the Farcaster team. Wilson explained that if he chooses to use Supercast, Nook, Kiosk, or any other Farcaster client, anyone can read and reply to his “casts” (similar to tweets) on any app, and vice versa. He stated, “This is similar to early Twitter with apps like Tweety, Tweetdeck, and many other third-party clients.”
Wilson further explained:
Wilson also pointed out that companies running social media applications today can de-platform politicians, change algorithms to optimize ads, and be shut down by the US government, so “we need a different model.” Wilson believes that Farcaster can solve these issues and referred to the protocol as “the Twitter ecosystem circa 2007,” with its on-chain business model ensuring it will never be shut down.
Wilson concluded:
Related article: “400% Surge in Daily Active Users! How to Make the Most of Farcaster’s Crypto Alpha Social App, Warpcast?”
