Neynar is seeking a new home and operating team for Farcaster, Clanker and its developer platform, marking a second planned operating transition for the decentralized social network in less than seven months. Co-founder Rishav Mukherji said on Aug. 18 that Neynar had started contacting teams that may be better suited to run decentralized social applications and developer products, while keeping the services operating for now. Mukherji said Neynar had failed to meet the goals it set when it took over Farcaster in January and that the current team was not the right fit for the next phase. He described Farcaster's situation as a combination of a close-knit community, a flagship application with meaningful operating costs and a slow-growth market, requiring a different organizational and capital structure from Neynar's. Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol that lets users access different clients with the same account while retaining their identity, content and follower relationships. Its main consumer entry point is the Farcaster app, while the ecosystem also includes mini-apps, wallet features and the AI token launch platform Clanker. Neynar said the protocol, app and developer services remain active and that users face no immediate disruption, but it has not identified a successor, set a timetable or said whether Farcaster, Clanker and Neynar's developer business will be transferred together or split among separate operators. The latest announcement follows Farcaster's Jan. 21 handoff from founders Dan Romero and Varun Srinivasan, whose company Merkle Manufactory had developed the protocol and client over roughly five years. Merkle raised about $180 million in total, including a $150 million round completed in 2024, and Romero later said the company would return its remaining capital to investors. Neynar, already one of Farcaster's main infrastructure providers, cut infrastructure costs by 80% after taking over, expanded the set of validator operators across regions and opened protocol code previously limited to the core team. It now plans to shift decisions on adding new validators to onchain voting by existing validators. Those changes strengthened Farcaster's ability to operate beyond a single company, but they did not solve the consumer growth challenge. Romero said in 2025 that roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people opened the Farcaster client each month and that usage likely needed to grow by 10 to 100 times for the network to reach sustainable scale. Neynar said the protocol itself continues to run because identity and key management sit in contracts on OP Mainnet, while posts, follows and interactions are stored by the Snapchain validator network. Even so, the Farcaster app, wallet, content distribution, customer support, Clanker and Neynar's developer interfaces still require a company to fund and operate them.