What Is Friend.tech?
Friend.tech is a decentralized social app built on Base that allows creators to connect to their audience through tokenized attenion, where a creator's influence is represented by keys that can be traded for access to exclusive private chatrooms and other perks.
Key Takeaways
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Friend.tech launched on the Base network on August 10, 2023, and promises new opportunities for creators and their audience to connect.
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Friend.tech allows creators to connect to their audience in a more personalized way and also monetize their influence. This is done through introducing a tokenized attention scenario where a creator’s influence is represented in keys (previously known as shares).
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Friend.tech is built on the blockchain and leverages smart contracts and cryptocurrency to commoditize social reach.
Coinbase’s Layer 2 network, Base, has seen a spike in usage over the past few weeks. Artemis reports an all-time high in the number of daily active addresses and daily transactions on the platform on August 10, 2023, where over 127,000 wallets sent an excess of 630,000 requests to the network during this time.
August 10 2023 was also the launch date of friend.tech, which is becoming one of the top dApps on Base, topping the charts in revenue and fees generated. As reported in Dune analytics, friend.tech has recorded over 200,000 users since its launch on August 10, 2023, and over $230 million in trading volume.
Source: Dune
The application, which is still in its beta phase, has seen over 139K ETH moved in trading volume by users. In fact, based on DefiLlama data, friend.tech is currently topping the charts for 7 day revenue, outstripping established DeFi protocols like MakerDAO and Lido at its peak.
Source: DefiLlama
Since then, while friend.tech has lost its top position in fees and revenue, it is still consistently in the top three, raking in $10 million in fees and $5 million in revenue over the past 7 days at time of writing.
CoinGecko now tracks friend.tech user shares. Click here to view.
Now, let's look at what exactly friend.tech is.
Understanding Friend.tech
Friend.tech is a compact web3 social media application that claims to connect creators to their audience in a gamified manner. Friend.tech’s operations range from tokenization to seamless interaction that leverages blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. On the surface, it is a social media application, but its mechanisms are driven by decentralized networks and crypto assets.
Friend.tech turns its users' influence into tokens. Users gain rights to a friend’s attention or influence by buying their platform tokens, which are known as keys (previously known as shares). The key price is guided by supply and demand conditions.
Meanwhile, creators have the freedom to experiment with ways to enhance their influence and attract new shareholders. In essence, it lets creators build a community and monetize their influence. For the audience, it offers access to their favorite creators where shareholders enjoy privileges such as exclusive conversations with the creator in chat rooms.
Since its launch, a handful of notable cryptocurrency influencers have joined the platform, including Hsaka Trades and Jordan Fish (Cobie). Beyond crypto influencers, NBA players and esports personalities have also signed up
Who Are the Founders of Friend.tech?
Friend.tech is founded by a two person team: 0xracerAlt and Shrimp.
Previously, Racer was involved with TweetDAO, a project that focused on running a Twitter account like a DAO, where only holders of the Tweet DAO Egg NFT collection would receive access to the account.
Racer then teamed up with Shrimp to create Stealcam, where single images can be uploaded to the site, which then becomes an NFT, but unlike conventional NFTs, users can’t see it unless they steal it, with the price going up every time the piece is stolen.
How Friend.tech Works
Friend.tech operates a PWA (Progressive Web Application), where users can manage their friend.tech profile from a browser-enabled mobile application. The PWA application features a non-custodial personal wallet, where users hold the private keys to their friend.tech wallets and can export their account’s wallet to other wallet applications.
Once a user completes their account creation and funds their wallets, Keys are created on their accounts, which other users can purchase to gain access to the account creator. Every user account on Friend.tech has keys; however, the value of the account’s keys is tied to the owner’s influence and how much these are sought after.
On friend.tech, users can interact with creators whose keys they own over chats, or explore popular creators. To date, over 38,500 ETH worth of creators’ Keys has been traded on the platform so far.
The usage statistics from the first few weeks of launch make a clear statement; friend.tech has successfully caused a buzz, and Crypto Twitter is excited about it. Now, let’s look at why friend.tech is so popular.
Learn about how to get started with friend.tech.
Why Is Friend.tech So Popular?
Friend.tech isn’t the only decentralized social media application. Its ability to turn the attention economy into a game is one of the reasons why it has drawn so many users to itself. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts love tokenization, especially when there is the opportunity to earn. In addition to this, it's up to the influencers to decide what they share in their private chatrooms, so the type of access these tokens (keys) grant can be extensively personalized.
Every user controls their keys and directly benefits from their key’s growth. In this way, friend.tech appeals to influencers, as it offers them a new monetization stream. As more popular personalities are jumping on the bandwagon, they are also carrying their followers along for the ride. After all, friend.tech presents opportunities to followers to interact with their favorite creators, as they can buy their way into a conversation with their idols.
Beyond the social aspect, friend.tech also has an airdrop tab, which opens up a point system. Points are airdropped on Fridays, and according to the app, these points will have future uses in friend.tech. This attracts airdrop hunters, who are looking to claim their place as early adopters and stand a chance of benefiting from any planned rewards in the future. Speculations around the earndropped tokens being used in the project’s governance have also stirred engagement even more.
Another factor is the hype around the Base network. Being a newly launched Layer 2 network that is associated with Coinbase, which has over 100 million users, the network’s popularity is on the rise. Some of this influence trickles down to projects launched in its ecosystem. In a developing event, Paradigm, an investment firm connected to Coinbase, announced that they are investing in the friend.tech project. This has increased investors' and users’ conviction about the project.
Twitter user 0xjaypeg sums up the appeal of friend.tech to both users and VCs in this tweet about the friend.tech flywheel:
Wonder how FriendTech is doing it?
— jay (@0xjaypeg) September 13, 2023
Why is every influencer saying this ponzi will continue?
Folius Ventures (web3 vc) just said FT will have a 1.5B FDV??
This explains the magic behind what friendtech has been doing https://t.co/SFUSguPfRN pic.twitter.com/OhESNzzHLL
Friend.tech Privacy Concerns
The Block shared an article citing a leaked database of Friend.tech users' profiles linked with their Ethereum addresses. While this has been confirmed to be misleading, as seen in this tweet from the project, it gives an idea of how friend.tech could make it easier to doxx users based on the link between their Twitter profiles and wallet address.
This is just someone scraping our public API that shows the association between public wallet addresses and public Twitter usernames.
— friend.tech (@friendtech) August 21, 2023
It’s like saying someone hacked you by looking at your public Twitter feed.
Irresponsible reporting from @TheBlock_ and @vishal4c https://t.co/GIXOWazqBk
Using the base network explorer, it is possible to trace user accounts on the platform to their wallet addresses while they transact on friend.tech, which users are aware of. Users are also required to provide a phone number during the account creation or signup using their Google or Apple accounts.
At time of writing, we are not sure about how the application uses and preserves personal data, as clicking on privacy policy on friend.tech’s home page opens up a “Coming soon!” notification. Users are advised to protect their personal information while using the platform – possible ways to do this is by signing up with an alternative email and using a new wallet address when moving funds to and from the platform.
Final Thoughts
Tokenization and true ownership are some of the most important features of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, respectively. Friend.tech attempts to tokenize influence and attention in a rather interesting way. It will probably strive to oust centralized creator economies like Onlyfans while deploying its technology on the Base network. Building on the Base network could give it some advantage due to the high throughput the Base network claims to possess. It will be interesting to witness its evolution and that of similar applications that could emerge in the future. Even more interesting will be how decentralized social platforms perform against centralized alternatives.
As creators and their fans explore the platform, it is recommended that they understand the potential privacy concerns as outlined above. Also, note that this article is only for educational purposes and not financial advice.
Joel is deeply interested in the technologies behind cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks. In his over 7 years of involvement in the space, he helps startups build a stronger internet presence through written content. Follow the author on Twitter @agboifesinachi
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