Miley Cyrus’ pop hit “Party in the U.S.A” opens with: I hopped off the plane at LAX / with a dream and a cardigan. For those of us who frequently fly through the Los Angeles International Airport, we can’t help but chuckle. Navigating the chaos of LAX, especially the infamously inconvenient LAX-it rideshare pickup point, is hardly the stuff dreams are made of.

And yet, for so many of us who have chosen to call LA home, that’s exactly what it is. Ted and I included.

Before Ted made LA her home, she came from further east. Born the second of four kids in a tight-knit family in Connecticut, Ted has always known herself to be outgoing and endlessly curious. “My mom told me that I had never met a stranger I wasn’t curious about,” Ted laughs.

Despite having wide-ranging interests, from reading to sports to dance, Ted was most inspired by her grandfather – a thoughtful, brilliant, and wonderfully goofy medical doctor whose humanitarian work brought him as far as Africa. “My grandfather was my absolute hero,” Ted says. “Becoming a doctor was my number one goal for the longest time.”

And for years, that’s exactly what she worked toward. Ted threw herself into four intense years of pre-med, studying everything from molecular biology to neuroscience. But while waiting to hear back from med schools, she made an unexpected decision: she moved to Barcelona to play for a professional women’s water polo team.

There, in a new city where she barely spoke the language, Ted picked up some light consulting work through a friend. And somewhere between the chlorine, the Catalan, and the quiet space away from a life she thought she wanted, something shifted. She realized she didn’t actually want to go back to school. More importantly, she realized she didn’t need to become a doctor to help people, or to scale the kind of impact she’d always dreamed of making.

Even as she packed her bags to leave Barcelona, Ted knew there was one thing she couldn’t give up: the Mediterranean weather. LA, with its endless stretch of 72-and-sunny days, felt like it had her name written all over it.

Once in LA, Ted joined a boutique consulting firm, where a celebrity client had just received a million-dollar crypto donation. With no one on the team knowing what to do with it, this prompted Ted’s first (and unexpected) deep dive into crypto. “We scrambled to find a lawyer who specialized in crypto, which was basically impossible at the time,” Ted recalls. “Meanwhile, I was just trying to wrap my head around what crypto even was.”

Ted eventually figured it out. She didn’t just learn what crypto was—she began to get excited about what it made possible. That curiosity led her to Morgan Stanley, where she helped pitch clients on adding Bitcoin exposure to their portfolios. But instead of feeling like she was at the forefront of financial innovation, she found herself disillusioned.“Because of all the regulations at the time, the product was only available to clients with assets of over three million dollars,” she explains. To Ted, institutional gatekeeping felt fundamentally at odds with what crypto promises, that is to fix broken systems and achieve greater financial inclusion. 

So, in 2020, Ted officially made the leap into crypto, joining a decentralized finance company called Goldfinch. Often shortened to DeFi, decentralized finance refers to peer-to-peer financial transactions that happen directly on the blockchain, without banks or intermediaries. That year, the space saw a surge in adoption during what became known as “DeFi Summer”, a breakout moment for crypto’s potential beyond speculation.

At Goldfinch, Ted worked on bringing private credit onchain – mission-driven work that felt both impactful and intellectually rewarding. But as the market started to cool, she also began to see the friction points firsthand: the sky-high cost of transactions (at a time when Layer 2 solutions did not exist at scale), and the steep difficulty of onboarding new users. “I found the user experience so fractured, both as an actual user and as someone building in the space,” Ted adds.

Ted had always been full of questions, and as the crypto space evolved, so did her quest for knowledge. Even then, she steered clear of Crypto Twitter. Having spent time representing clients and working at Morgan Stanley, she remained hyper-aware of what she posted online.

All that changed thanks to a serendipitous connection. Her boyfriend at the time had gone to school with Dan Romero, one of the founders of Farcaster. After running into Dan and learning he was building a “decentralized Twitter,” her boyfriend passed the news along. “My boyfriend didn’t really get it,” Ted recalls, “but he immediately thought it sounded like something I’d be into.”

Since Dan was personally onboarding every new user to Farcaster, Ted had to keep (not so) subtly nudging her boyfriend to ask again. “I wasn’t begging,” she laughs, “but I was definitely like, ‘Soooo… talked to Dan lately?’” Eventually, she scored herself an invite, bypassing the white-glove onboarding and sneaking in with an invite code of her own. Ted’s Farcaster ID is 259, making her the 259th user to join the decentralized social network, which now boasts nearly a million users.

Once on Farcaster, Ted quickly found herself getting answers to every crypto-related question she had. These high quality responses were also coming from industry veterans, including early Coinbase employees. But what struck her wasn’t just the access to knowledge, but the values of the community. “People actually believed in decentralization,” she says. “Not just as a way to make money, but as a way to build a better Internet.” Curious to meet the humans behind the avatars, Ted showed up to her first community meetup, where to everyone’s surprise, she turned out to be a woman.

It wasn’t long before Ted became a real power user. One of the first to post content unrelated to crypto, she also took it upon herself to report product bugs directly to the team. “I joined Farcaster when there was no mobile app,” she recalls. “You couldn’t even see who liked your posts.” She was also added to an early auto-follow list, a now-retired feature designed to help seed the social graph.

Ted may have the auto-follow list to thank for her early numbers, but the community she’s nurtured since then is entirely her own. “I started to wonder… out of all the people who followed me—whether by choice or by default—who’s actually still here, and who actually cares?” Ted says.

That question led to the creation of Club Ted. “I wanted to do something small and fun with people who genuinely wanted to get to know each other,” Ted says. She floated the idea quietly, telling just a few people. One of them was Johnny Mack (@nonlinear.eth on Farcaster), who happened to be building Hypersub, an onchain membership platform that provided the tools for Club Ted to take shape. With membership capped at 69, it quickly became a token-gated sanctuary where people connected over learning, support, and shared curiosity. 

That same passion for community led Ted to spearhead the first large-scale (but second-ever) FarCon, Farcaster’s community-run conference in Venice, California. “We thought maybe 150 people would come,” she says. “But 300 signed up before we even finalized the venue.” Keeping things to one intimate location to avoid the usual chaos of crypto events, Ted eventually pulled it off with help from her mom and sister, all while juggling a full-time job. “More than anything, I wanted to make space for everyone, even those who’d only just joined Farcaster,” she adds.

With Ted as one of Farcaster’s most visible champions, it’s no surprise many assumed she already worked there. Those who knew she didn’t just kept asking Dan to hire her. Ted made a case of her own too—showing she could contribute meaningfully by organizing and coordinating a Developer Day for 80 builders. Yet for months, Dan remained steadfast in hiring only technical roles.

That changed at the end of January, when he finally reached out. “Dan told me they were going to take a really big swing this year,” Ted says. “And said that we’re going to go big or go home, and would love to see if you’d be interested in joining the team.”

The answer was an obvious yes. While joining the team felt like a dream, it didn’t come without a reality check. “It’s one thing to be a power user with frustrations and feature requests,” Ted explains. “It’s another to be on the inside, seeing firsthand the constraints, tradeoffs, and ruthless prioritization it takes to actually build something that works.” 

Though Ted believes Farcaster’s greatest retention engine is its community, she’s under no illusions about the challenge ahead. “It’s both fun and insanely hard,” she adds. “You realize just how steep the climb is to make consumer crypto work. But being part of such a focused and passionate team makes it all feel worthwhile.”

As FarCon enters its third year, this time in New York City, the Farcaster ecosystem feels stronger than ever, both in community and in product. Farcaster Mini Apps (formerly known as Frames) have opened up entirely new ways to build social experiences onchain. Warpcast now includes its own embedded wallet (affectionately dubbed the “Warplet”), and the Farcaster feed is being integrated directly into the new version of Coinbase Wallet—bringing millions closer to seamless onchain connection.

But for Ted, it’s still the values that matter most. Farcaster, to her, remains one of the most intellectually curious, civil, and genuinely fun corners of the internet. She also believes it to be the healthiest way to engage with social media, and is proof that community, when designed with care, can be more than noise.

The road to 100 million users is still long. But like her television namesake said: “I believe in hope. I believe in belief.” Ted does. The Farcaster team does. And if you’re casting, building, or simply showing up, you probably do too.

Want to read this in print? Drop me a DM on X or Farcaster for a link to download a print-friendly PDF once you've collected Ted's story onchain.

Interested in more stories like these? Digital Mavericks by Debbie Soon is an accessible guide to crypto and features inspirational stories from 13 onchain trailblazers. Grab your copy today from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.