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Author: Nikhil Raman, analyst at USV investment team; Translation: Bitchain Vision xiaozou
Last week, Farcaster announced their latest round of funding, and USV (Union Square Ventures) also announced its lead investment (see previous report from Bitchain Vision “$150 million Series A Financing Becomes Unicorn Why VCs are optimistic about Farcaster”). USV has been thinking about and supporting social applications for 20 years and we are very pleased to finally see the strong momentum of such a new form of social interaction, which is more open and composable than previous web2 social interaction, to users andDevelopers have given more power.
Specifically, over the past few months, we have seen a significant increase in users and developers in the Farcaster ecosystem, and when we talk to various development teams, we realized that most of the conversations ended up referring to Neynar.
Neynar is a set of developer tools that can help developers easily develop and build social protocols such as Farcaster.These tools include cloud hosting Hubs, read and write APIs, authorization, data processes, managed DBs, and more.They are everywhere in the Farcaster ecosystem, and almost every application uses Neynar in some form.
At USV, we believe that useful infrastructure often emerges in specific patterns.Specifically, through previous observations, we have found that applications first bring infrastructure construction, and infrastructure in turn supports more new applications.
The experiences of Neynar developers Rish and Manan are a great example of this pattern in practice.They initially tried to build a social application based on Farcaster, but found that the default Farcaster API seriously affected the performance of the application.As they developed custom tools for Hubs to serve their own applications, they began to realize that there were many other teams facing the same problem and were working to find solutions.In this way, Neynar was born.
The on-chain social ecosystem is developing rapidly.Users, open data, open maps and seamless composability are attracting more and more developers, opening up a wave of experiments.Neynar is driving this rapid pace of development, continuously expanding its product supply to meet the growing market demand.Starting from helping each development team read and write the Farcaster protocol, it gradually evolved to help developers authenticate and obtain user authorization.
In January, Frames (embedible mini app) was released, and Neynar became the preferred tool for developers and creators to create and host frames.With the growth of active users and the surge in new users, content audits, user quality and data conversion have become even more important, and Neynar has become home to acquire and host this data and provide simple and valuable metadata related to user reputation.
With Farcaster, a new, non-bundled social landscape is taking shape, and Neynar is helping developers build new experiences at all levels such as headless markets, audit bots, data platforms, reputation protocols and many new clients.Neynar is ready to provide full infrastructure support for this.
We are excited to join Haun Ventures in leading the $11 million Series A round of funding from Neynar.
