Farcaster co-founders join Stripe’s Tempo blockchain following Neynar acquisition

Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan have joined Tempo, the upcoming stablecoin-focused blockchain, fresh off the acquisition of their previous venture Farcaster.

The pair, who created the crypto-based social network in 2020, announced the move on their respective X accounts on Monday. It’s not clear what specific roles the pair will fill at Tempo.

“Stablecoins are a generational opportunity,” Romero said on X. “I’m excited to work with Matt Huang, Georgios Konstantopoulos and the rest of the team to make them mainstream.”

“Tempo is working on the most important problem in finance: building a global payments network that is fast, inexpensive and transparent,” Srinivasan said on X.

Farcaster, which Romero and Srinivasan led for the past five years, was acquired last month by Neynar, a startup that builds tools for Farcaster developers, as it struggled to get the product to catch on with users.

As part of the deal, Neynar took over the protocol’s smart contracts, code repositories, mobile app and Clanker, an AI token launchpad. Romero, Srinivasan, and several employees at Merkle Manufactory, the firm behind Farcaster, stepped away from day-to-day development.

After the acquisition, Romero said he plans to return all $180 million Farcaster raised to investors.

Stacking talent

For Romero and Srinivasan, the move to Tempo keeps the pair at the pinnacle of the crypto industry.

Before founding Farcaster, they both worked at Coinbase. Romero ran consumer business and international expansion as a vice president, while Srinivasan directed the crypto exchange’s engineering and product teams.

Tempo has been stacking talent in recent months.

The project, backed by fintech giant Stripe and crypto venture firm Paradigm, added former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist to its ranks in October.

Former Optimism Labs CEO Liam Horne and Rice University Professor Mallesh Pai also joined late last year.

Tempo already counts over a dozen firms as partners, including Anthropic, Coupang, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Lead Bank, Mercury, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Visa, and Klarna.

In December, the project rolled out its testnet ahead of a full launch scheduled for later this year.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at [e-mail].