Act I — The sparkTwo Coinbase alum—Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan—left a comfortable trajectory in 2020 with a simple hunch: your social identity and audience should live with you, not on a company’s server. That hunch became Farcaster, a “sufficiently decentralized” social protocol where users own IDs, apps compete on UX, and data can’t be quietly revoked. They started from first principles: put the core identity and permissions on Ethereum, keep the rest off-chain for performance. Concrete...

Act I — The sparkTwo Coinbase alum—Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan—left a comfortable trajectory in 2020 with a simple hunch: your social identity and audience should live with you, not on a company’s server. That hunch became Farcaster, a “sufficiently decentralized” social protocol where users own IDs, apps compete on UX, and data can’t be quietly revoked. They started from first principles: put the core identity and permissions on Ethereum, keep the rest off-chain for performance. Concrete...