This week, Bloomberg reported that Merkle is closing a new round of financing at a $1B valuation. Not a single Farcaster who was active in the community before frames, including myself, was surprised by this news.

Crypto investment firm Paradigm is leading the investment in Los Angeles-based Merkle Manufactory, whose software underpins the Farcaster social-media network, the people said — Bloomberg

I spent almost a decade in crypto without a community. My journey began in 2014 with Bitcoin, picked up steam with Ethereum, and got serious in 2018 with NFTs. During that entire time, I only had a few friends who shared my interest. I went as far as creating TexasToken in 2017 to find a local community. In 2021, I spent all my free time outside of work on crypto. My brilliant wife sat me down one day and said, "Hey, you should probably just work in crypto,"… and so I went all-in.

Once full-time, I really yearned for a community where I could connect with other builders, share challenges and lessons, and get feedback on what I was working on. My YC friends thought I was crazy: "You should just do AI." Online, my Twitter followers, mostly friends, didn't care about crypto; I felt Crypto Discord servers and Telegram groups were noisy and lacked the high-quality projects and builders I wanted to be around. I had no outlet and felt pretty alone.

And then I found Farcaster. One day in January 2022, Kyle McCollom (@kyle) asked me if I was interested in joining this new crypto social network. I got the invite from Dan on 1/7/22, joined as FID #373, lurked for a few months, and started to become active thanks to a nudge from Victor Ma (@vm).

For me, the magic of Farcaster in the early days was two-fold: first, it was the promise of a better social media future where I owned and had more control over my network, and second, it was the highest quality community of crypto builders you could find online. I met dozens of my now closest friends; I learned more than I could ever imagine about crypto, consumer apps, social media, and being a founder; I felt immense support during the worst of the bear market, hosted and went to some meetups, launched a few things, and oh boy did I collect some cool shit. I found my community. I came for the tech, and I stayed for the people.

Congratulations, Merkle Manufactory, Paradigm, and the Farcaster community!