Farcaster's Dan Romero on Rebuilding Social Media the Right Way

Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero has been in crypto long enough to know the difference between hype and substance. After starting at Coinbase in 2014, he's watched the space swing from speculative mania to existential regulatory threats — and now, into something new. Something hopeful.

Farcaster is somewhat akin to a Web3 X, or Twitter — but unlike other Web3 social media challengers that came before it, it oddly seems like it's focused on something different. Maybe that stems from the luxury of having the warchest to do so — having raised more than $150 million from a who's who of crypto VCs, or maybe it will soon stem from a brand new regulatory sea change.

“I’ve never been more bullish from a regulatory standpoint,” he said. “The SEC has dropped all of those [crypto lawsuits] which I think is phenomenal for the industry, especially for the good players.”

With clearer skies ahead, Romero says it’s finally time to build the next phase of the internet. “We're going to get the first breakout app that is non-speculative,” he predicted. “That is my bet for 2025.”

For Romero, Farcaster is an attempt to rewrite the rules of social media by grounding identity in crypto wallets and activity — not just blue checks and bots. Many projects have attempted building a better social media platform by leveraging Web3 tech before him, but almost all of them have chased optimizing for short-term token drops. Farcaster, instead, has leveraged its funding history to focus on exactly the opposite — attracting a certain quality of user over a quantity of them.

Farcaster’s identity layer, Romero says, is now built on a stack of signals: onchain balances, connected X accounts, and community trust. “We’ve had over 150,000 users connect an X account,” he said. “You can kind of think of that as a social credibility rating.”

He admits: “No one signal is a panacea.” Some accounts have rich onchain history and post “AI-generated slop,” while others with less history post “really interesting content.” That’s why the platform now offers developers permissionless access to rich data. “That transparency just doesn’t exist on X,” Romero said. “The only thing you have on X is a blue check mark that says, I paid $8 a month.”

And as social media algorithms shift toward engagement at all costs, Romero sees opportunity. “People were like, 'Oh, X is going to go to zero.' It didn’t. It’s still here,” he said. “But subjectively and anecdotally, virtually everyone I talk to says, 'My algo feels cooked,' or worse."

Instead, Farcaster has attempted to experiment in a unique way that allows it to emulate some of the best things about legacy social media platforms, without trying to combine too much. It may feel similar to X, but unlike X, Farcaster says it doesn't suppress outside links — which allows creators to share freely and rewards them for the attention they generate. That has particularly resonated with creators (like yours truly) who have seen X throttle back reach if they try to promote off-platform content.

“[X] was a distribution platform for creative people, entrepreneurs, anyone,” Romero said about the platform before the pivot under Elon Musk led to a change in its algorithm. “Breaking that social contract on Twitter ... that’s been a huge boon for us.”

But Romero still credits X for pushing the envelope in other ways. Romero points to Farcaster’s weekly $25,000 in rewards that get distributed to users as a working model. “It’s not about the money,” he said about the rewards, which are paid out in USDC stablecoins on Base. “It’s the fact that there’s kind of a leaderboard ... people are like, 'I’ve been on social media for 15-plus years and I’ve never earned a dime.'”

But as exciting as it is to reward users, Romero and the Farcaster team is still cautious about where that goes next. The natural step would appear to be to launch a native token — but that historically has come with its own set of challenges.

“Whatever mechanism you want to do — USDC, a token — you’re going to end up with a one-time thing upfront and then price go down,” he said. “You have to actually have a sustainable model that is creating value long term.” The real unlock, according to Romero, is Web3’s power to reshape how users even enter the ecosystem.

“I’m increasingly convinced that the way most people will get their first crypto is not via [purchased through an] onramp,” he said. “If you didn’t have to put money into the system and instead the system gave you some amount of money ... that is a major net-positive.”

Romero calls this “proof-of-work” for users — a philosophy he shares with content creators who have taken the long route, like Coinage on our path to earn a YouTube Silver Play Button award. “Assuming you have a good algo and good tweaks so that it’s not getting abused ... that is ultimately the most valuable thing.”

So what’s next? Romero teased a growing mini-app ecosystem, likening it to Telegram’s. “You can now natively open up within Farcaster apps ... it works really well on mobile,” he said. “If you can’t make a crypto experience work really well on mobile, it’s going to be DOA.”

Ultimately, Romero believes the breakout moment is coming. “You’re going to see a higher quality entrepreneur entering into crypto and thinking about how to use tokens to build fundamentally valuable new things,” he said. “I think this is going to be a golden age for people who are taking a little bit more of a long-term approach.”

Amen to that.

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