Dan Romero

Dan Romero is an investor, the former vice president of international business of Coinbase, and the founder of Farcaster and its parent organization Merkle Manufactory.

Romero was the vice president of international business of Coinbase. He joined the organization in April 2014, near the beginning of its founding. He led the institution-focused section of Coinbase's operations across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions. Romero left the company in April 2019.

Founded by Romero in 2020, Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized protocol used to build new social networks. A sufficiently decentralized network is defined by Farcaster as a network that always allows two users to communicate as long as they wish to do so, even if the network tries to oppose it. This means that no third parties can control user information. Developers must be allowed unrestricted access to the network, and users must be allowed to switch freely between applications. Farcaster achieves this through its hybrid architecture made up of on-chain and off-chain components. It stores user identities on-chain in an Ethereum smart contract. These identities are controlled by Ethereum addresses that can be used to sign off-chain messages. Once signed, user data is stored off-chain on user-controlled servers called Farcaster Hubs.

Each Farcaster user account is tied to a unique number called a Farcaster ID. Accounts can be pseudonymous, and users can have more than one account. Optionally, users can acquire a unique Farcaster Name from the Farcaster Name Registry (FNR), such as @alice.

Romero is the founder of Merkle Manufactory, the controlling organization of Farcaster. In July 2022, Merkle Manufactory raised $30 million in a funding round to develop Farcaster.

StrawPoll was a Twitter-based polling application created by Romero and Rob Goodlatte in 2007. It offered daily opinion polls to Twitter users with the ability for users to write comments explaining their votes. Results of the poll were graphed. The initial application was not majorly successful at the time, but it relaunched in Germany as strawpoll.de in 2014. This launch was successful, even outside of Germany, and in 2017, the international domain strawpoll.com was acquired. Since that point, StrawPoll has been its own company, founded by Gregor Krambs.

Romero is an investor in technology companies. His investments include Linear, TipTop, Center, 3Box, Coherent, and Eight Sleep.