Neynar has started looking for a new team to run Farcaster, the token launcher Clanker and its own developer platform, co-founder Rish Mukherji said on Aug. 17, seven months after the company acquired the decentralized social protocol from Merkle Manufactory.

That puts Farcaster into its second ownership handoff of 2026 and leaves it without a funded operator. Neynar will return what is left of its balance sheet and its staff will disperse, so the protocol, the app and Clanker need a buyer to keep running.

“We’ve started a process to look for a new home / team to run the products going forward,” Mukherji wrote. “Earlier this year, this seemed to be a good fit for our team: it was a developer-first network, and we’d been serving developers from the start. There’s been a lot of change since then and we’re not the right fit for what’s needed next.”

He said Neynar is “talking to a few teams we think could be a good fit for running decentralized social apps and related developer products,” and that “our company will return its balance sheet (most of it remains) and team members will move on to something new.”

$35 Million To $377,000

Farcaster’s economics collapsed over the period Neynar owned it. The protocol, which DefiLlama tracks as the combination of Farcaster’s own social-finance service fees and Clanker’s cut of swap fees, generated $35.43 million in fees in the first quarter of 2026, according to DefiLlama. Second-quarter fees came to $4.67 million. Between July 1 and Aug. 17, the protocol has produced $376,740.

The trailing figures are smaller still: $120,194 over the past 30 days, $30,497 over the past seven and $4,001 over the past 24 hours. Cumulative fees since launch stand at $94.1 million.

Buybacks funded by those fees have stopped. Holders revenue, which DefiLlama attributes to CLANKER token buybacks, was $3.98 million in the first quarter, $3,853 in the second and zero so far in the third.

CLANKER traded at $12.29, down 3.6% on the day, with a market capitalization of $12.12 million and $52,900 in 24-hour volume across 508,100 holders, per GeckoTerminal. The token jumped 350% when Farcaster acquired the launchpad.

The January Handoff

Merkle Manufactory, the company Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan built around Farcaster, transferred the protocol contracts, code repositories, the Farcaster app and Clanker to Neynar on Jan. 21. Romero wrote at the time that “after five years, it’s clear Farcaster needs a new approach and leadership to reach its full potential.”

A day later, responding to shutdown rumors, Romero said the protocol had “250,000 MAU in December and over 100,000 funded wallets,” described Neynar as “a venture-backed startup” planning to shift Farcaster “in a more developer-focused direction,” and said Merkle planned “to return the full $180M raised back to investors.”

Romero and Srinivasan joined Tempo, the Stripe- and Paradigm-incubated payments chain, in February.

Neynar itself raised $11 million in a May 2024 Series A led by Haun Ventures and Union Square Ventures, with a16z CSX and Coinbase Ventures participating. The company has not disclosed what it paid for Farcaster or how much of its balance sheet remains.

Who Wants It

Mukherji invited interested parties to reach out. Megapot, an onchain lottery on Base, replied publicly: “we are interested.”

Farcaster abandoned its consumer social strategy in December 2025 to focus on a wallet, after activity on the network began falling from its 2024 peak. The gap between its headline user counts and actual usage has been disputed since 2024.

“This is not a decision we made lightly,” Mukherji wrote. “I’m optimistic that with this next iteration, Farcaster will find its long term fit.”