Dan Romero is the Co-founder of Farcaster, a decentralized platform designed for constructing social networks within the Web3 ecosystem. ^[1][2][3]

Career

Coinbase

Prior to joining Coinbase in 2014, Dan initially declined an offer in 2013 by Fred Ehrsam to join Coinbase and help with customer support. He chose to work at a SaaS startup instead. Over the next year, Dan became intrigued with Bitcoin and reached out to Fred about the role at Coinbase.

"Over the next year, I started to become more intrigued by Bitcoin. I got so obsessed with it that I reached back out to Fred (a year later after he had offered me that first role) and told him that I wanted to quit the SaaS company and join in whatever role I could take. That’s how I started working at Coinbase as employee #20"

When he joined in 2014, his first job was to find use cases for Bitcoin. ^[4][7]

"For example, I tried to get merchants like Dell.com and Expedia.com to accept Bitcoin as a payment method. That use case didn’t end up working and I spent my first year not moving the needle at all. It was pretty frustrating." - Dan on roles he took at Coinbase ^[7]

In his time at the firm, Romero worked on “almost every aspect” of the Coinbase business including banking partnerships and both consumer and institutional businesses. ^[4][5]

On April 12, 2019, Dan announced on his blog that he would be leaving Coinbase at the end of April. ^[4]

"I’m planning to take some time to figure out what’s next, but I remain as optimistic as ever about the potential of cryptocurrency and Coinbase."^[4]

Farcaster

In 2020, Dan Romero co-founded Farcaster alongside Varun Srinivasan, described in the project's own documentation, as a "sufficiently decentralized social network built on Ethereum." On how Farcaster came to be, Dan commented:

"I've been in crypto 10 years and I was at Coinbase for five of those and then have been building Farcaster for the last three. And Farcaster is a decentralized social network. So if you were to use the app, it feels very much like Twitter, but we have a few different features and one of those is Frames."

Farcaster is a decentralized protocol designed specifically for building and connecting social apps. It aims to create a censorship-free environment where users have full control over their data and audience. To achieve this, Farcaster employs a sufficiently decentralized network architecture that lets users control their social graph and enables them to interact with various apps on the network via a single identity. ^[3]

On January 26, 2024, daily active users on Farcaster surged following the launch of a new feature, Frames. Frames effectively turns Farcaster-based posts into interactive mini-apps, allowing users to mint NFTs, play games, and use instant checkouts directly from their social feed without leaving the platform. ^[6]

"Frames are interactive social media posts. And the best analog to think about is when you use Twitter, you can post a tweet with text, image, video, and then there's one type of post that you can do on Twitter that has some interactivity, and that's a poll, right? So you can pick the options you want, and then as a kind of a reader or a viewer, you can vote in someone's poll and then see the results." - Dan explained

"But with a poll, Twitter controls that entire experience and you can't modify it. You can't come up with a new creative way of displaying that poll or another use for those buttons. It's pretty constrained"

"With Frames, it gives developers a kind of total canvas within our app to kind of display content and then have interactivity, define what the buttons that will show up next to a frame. And so it's kind of almost like a mini app within an app. And it's kind of like a mini app within an app" ^[6]