On Thursday, Romero shared on X that Merkle Manufactory plans to refund all investor capital:

“As for Merkle, we plan to return the full $180 million raised back to investors. Over the last five years, we’ve tried to be good stewards of investor capital.”

Romero highlighted that the protocol had 250,000 monthly active users and more than 100,000 funded wallets as of December. He also noted that Neynar intends to shift the project in a more developer-focused direction:

“Farcaster is not shutting down. The protocol works and will continue to work.”

Former Coinbase executive and early Farcaster supporter Balaji Srinivasan also confirmed the refund plan:

“The technology is real and works. The transfer to Neynar could help Farcaster achieve its long-term goal of deeper decentralization.”

Founded in 2020 by Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, Merkle Manufactory is backed by major investors including a16z Crypto and Paradigm. Following a $150 million Series A round in 2024, Farcaster was reportedly valued at $1 billion.

Farcaster’s $180 million refund plan has been confirmed by supporting venture capital funds and strategic partners. This step reinforces Farcaster’s long-term mission to advance decentralized social media.

What is Farcaster?

Farcaster stands out in the decentralized social media ecosystem by giving users control over their data and audience. Built by Coinbase alumni in 2020, the protocol runs on Optimism, managing accounts, usernames, signers, and messages on-chain while social interactions leverage off-chain storage. Applications like Warpcast offer a Twitter-like experience—censorship-resistant, interoperable, and user-first. Its hybrid architecture ensures identity data is on-chain while social activity remains off-chain, so users maintain ownership of their content and followers even when switching apps. As of 2025, Frames enables on-chain and off-chain actions—including NFT minting, gaming, and commerce—directly within the feed.

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Aave’s Deployment on Aptos: Supported Assets and Protocol Strength 

Aave enters Aptos to extend its multichain strategy across different ecosystems. At launch, the protocol supports native USDC, USDT, APT, and sUSDe. Aptos Foundation attracts users through incentive programs, ensuring faster growth in adoption. 

The Block’s data shows Aave managing over $50 billion in net deposits and nearly $37 billion in total value locked. The protocol enables users and institutions to earn interest on deposits. It also lets them borrow crypto against collateral and issues the overcollateralized GHO stablecoin. 

Chainlink oracles secure price data, strengthening transparency and reliability in lending markets. This integration gives users confidence in safe and resilient borrowing activity. 

Aptos and Aave: Building a Shared Vision 

Aptos runs as a proof-of-stake Layer 1 blockchain built with Move, a Rust-based smart contract language. The network emphasizes low-latency finality and high throughput to attract developers. 

Aave Labs re-implemented Aave V3 in Move and developed a new SDK and front-end. Chaos Labs and LlamaRisk created market risk parameters. Zellic, Ottersec, SpearBit, and Certora conducted security reviews. Aave also launched a $500,000 bug bounty program paid in GHO. 

The Aptos ecosystem currently holds around $1.3 billion in stablecoins, dominated by USDT. Only 8.1% of APT supply is in liquid staking tokens, while 76% remains directly staked. Aave and Aptos see this gap as an opportunity to unlock new collateral markets. 

Ultimately, Aave’s launch on Aptos opens a new chapter in DeFi expansion. Developers gain direct access to Aave’s lending infrastructure with full tooling support. Users benefit from lending, borrowing, oracle-secured markets, and incentive programs at launch. In the coming months, both teams plan to add more assets, refine risk settings, and strengthen security through ongoing audits. 

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IPFS Successfully Tested in Orbit

The Filecoin Foundation and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin have transmitted data using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) on a satellite orbiting Earth. The announcement came from Filecoin Foundation president Marta Belcher at the Consensus 2025 conference in Toronto.

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Unlike traditional web protocols like HTTP, IPFS identifies data by its content rather than location. Belcher noted that this structure is especially beneficial for space, where radiation-induced data corruption is common and latency is a serious issue. IPFS allows cryptographic verification, ensuring that data remains untampered even in extreme environments.

Reducing Delay in Space Data Transfers

“There’s a multi-second delay from the Moon and a multi-minute delay from Mars,” Belcher explained. With IPFS, users query a content ID and retrieve data from the closest source — be it your device, a satellite, or a lunar station. This drastically cuts down the delay and enhances the reliability of the system.

The Filecoin protocol uses this decentralized architecture to distribute multiple copies of data across a global network, reducing dependence on centralized storage hubs. In space, where hardware degrades more quickly, this redundancy ensures the integrity of critical data, such as satellite imagery.

Media and Military Applications on the Horizon

Belcher added that interest in decentralized storage is also rising in media and defense sectors. Archiving sensitive data securely and retrieving it globally can be revolutionary for many industries. The FIL token, central to the Filecoin ecosystem, currently holds a market capitalization of approximately $1.8 billion as of May 16.

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