According to Bloomberg, Los Angeles-based Merkle Manufactory, a developer of software for decentralized social media networks, is closing a new round of financing led by former Crypto investment firm Paradigm. The company's software underpins the Farcaster social media network. Founded in 2020, Merkle Manufactory has two main products: the Farcaster protocol with a blockchain component, and Warpcast, an app built on top of Farcaster which closely resembles the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Merkle last raised capital in July 2022 in a $30 million round led by a16z Crypto. In January, the Farcaster ecosystem introduced a new feature called Frames, which allows developers to display the functionality of external apps without forcing users to click away from Warpcast. Developers have used the Frames feature to run polls, play chess, and even mint nonfungible tokens. The number of daily active users on the Farcaster network jumped to over 50,000 in early February from less than 10,000 the month before.