This week’s major deals feature Web3 social media platform Farcaster raising $150 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm.
Crypto startup funding surged to $2.4 billion in the first quarter of 2024, according to a PitchBook report released Monday. This marks a 40% increase in invested capital from the last quarter of 2023.
“With positive investor sentiment returning to crypto, and assuming no major market downturns, we anticipate the volume and pace of investments to continue rising throughout the year,” PitchBook analysts confidently asserted in the report.
Highlighting the week’s major deals, Web3 social media platform Farcaster raised $150 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm, with significant contributions from a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, Variant, and Standard Crypto.
“Since transitioning to a permissionless model last October, Farcaster has achieved 350,000 paid sign-ups and a 50x surge in network activity,” Farcaster co-founder Dan Romero proudly stated on Tuesday.
Farcaster, the protocol powering the highly-discussed social network Warpcast, has drawn considerable attention within the crypto community this year. The company’s February launch of the Frames feature, which integrates identity and payment rails, further solidified its innovative stance.
In other notable news, EVM layer-2 Plume announced a $10 million seed funding round led by Haun Ventures, with additional investments from Galaxy Ventures, Superscrypt, and Portal Ventures.
Plume, designed to bring real-world assets on-chain, now supports over 80 RWA and DeFi projects on its private testnet. These projects encompass collectibles, alternative assets, synthetics, luxury goods, and real estate.
“While many aim to solve tokenization through permissioned environments, Plume distinguishes itself with a crypto-first approach,” stated Chris Yin, CEO and co-founder of Plume. “We operate as a permissionless chain, offering seamless compliance tooling as a standout feature.”