Neynar is building the default technology stack for social protocols.
Our social nature is reflected in our infrastructure and technology — from social physical spaces to social software. Software that starts single player evolves to multiplayer, from Google Docs letting you add co-authors to your document to Spotify letting you add friends to your playlist.
Traditionally, when building social products, companies have had to bootstrap the network from scratch meaning all users have to re-establish their identities, reputation and social graphs. Additionally, user generated content is siloed within each product that then needs to be managed, scaled and moderated. For fledgling companies, this is a major barrier to product-market-fit. Companies that do manage to cross this hurdle eventually shut down access to their data or put it behind extremely high paywalls (see here and here) due to business model concerns. This has stifled social product innovation over the last few decades.
A new way to build social software
With the birth of blockchains, new innovation is taking shape in the social network space. Similar to HTTP and SMTP being open protocols for internet and email, there are new protocols like Farcaster that are open protocols for social interactions. Analogous to multiple browsers or multiple email clients permissionlessly existing on HTTP and SMTP, Farcaster allows any developer to permissionlessly use social primitives as building blocks in their product. However, this also presents new development challenges.
Building on the early web required developers to run their own web server on their desktops. There were no cloud servers or cloud email inboxes. Farcaster was at the same stage in early 2023. Developers were required to run their own Hubs (equivalent to a blockchain node or early web server) and build application layer APIs on top of these hubs before they could start building their product. If hacking on a new idea, this made the product development process much more complex than traditional software development.
New protocols require new architectures
Neynar solves this problem. We built Neynar so that developers can build on social protocols in the easiest way possible. We were the first to provide cloud hosted hubs and have since built out a full stack of products for developers building on Farcaster — read and write APIs, auth, hosted indexed databases, webhooks, data pipelines, and more. We’re innovating at the architecture layer that allows us to serve data at scale for offchain decentralized networks. These networks have novel distributed systems problems compared to onchain blockchains. We are now serving thousands of developers and companies integrating social building blocks into their applications and have seen hockey stick growth over the last ten months.
Today, we’re excited to announce we’ve raised $11M in Series A funding from Haun Ventures and Union Square Ventures, with participation from our existing investors a16z CSX and Coinbase Ventures, and support from the best founders in the crypto ecosystem¹.
We’re excited about the future
Decentralized social protocols will do to social media what the internet did to publishing media. Instead of a handful of monoliths deciding information flow, we will see a long tail of social applications and integrations, resulting in a wide variety of unique social experiences. Additionally, we’ll see more content signed with private keys for provenance, particularly against AI generated content. Farcaster frames are a good example of this phenomenon.
These trends are in their infancy and yet, hundreds of applications and over 50k users write to Farcaster through Neynar already. Our infrastructure powers a full spectrum of products — clients like Supercast and Drakula, marketplaces like Bountycaster, moderation tools like Automod, to big data products like Dune.
It’s still “Day 1”. With this new fundraise, we plan to grow our engineering team and continue to make it easier for developers to build on social protocols. If you’re building something new in crypto, we’d love to work with you. If you’re interested in helping building on permissionless protocols, we’re hiring!
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¹ prev. raised $3.2M
