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Friend.Tech is a decentralized social media platform integrated with X (formerly known as Twitter). It is based on the new L2 solution from Coinbase – Base network.
The concept of Friend.Tech is pretty simple. The app is a marketplace for investing in other users — content creators, celebrities, or just your friends and acquaintances.
Any registered member can buy the “keys” of a certain content creator and receive many privileges in interactions with the said creator in return. The main privilege is access to a group chat where you can chat with the owner of the profile.
The price of keys is determined by the bond curve – the more keys are bought and sold, the higher the price. The platform earns a 5% fee on every key sold (including both initial sales and further resales of keys), and another 5% fee goes to the creator.
In other words, Friend.Tech tries to combine the benefits of social and financial interactions in one place. Judging by the platform’s growth, the public is very interested in the idea.
Friend.Tech Statistics
Friend.Tech enjoyed a truly explosive start – 10 days after launch, it surpassed Uniswap in terms of fees generated. And in one month (by September 9, 2023), Friend. Tech’s revenue exceeded $5 million, and the total revenue sent to creators exceeded $18 million.
The platform enjoyed similarly rapid growth in terms of user numbers and their activity as well. 539.8k transactions made on the platform were recorded on September 13 – this was the peak of user activity on the platform. The number of active users exceeded 300 thousand by the end of September (not including hundreds of thousands of bots purged from the platform). Overall, by early October, the protocol had recorded an inflow of over 213 million ETH, and the total value locked (TVL) exceeded $50 million.
However, in October Friend.Tech began to lose steam. The revenue streams started to dry out, and new user influx stopped, and even the largest content creator on the platform – ‘Vombatus’ – jumped ship.
By early December, the platform was a meager shadow of its former self – there were only about 7 thousand daily transactions that generated only about 11,5 ETH in fees. Although, the TVL amount remained relatively high – about $37 million. Will Friend.Tech ever recover remains to be seen.
Smart Friend.Tech Solutions
It is obvious that Friend. Tech’s success (especially in the early months of the platform’s existence) is based on several key decisions that helped the platform attract the audience’s attention and achieve explosive growth.
The Platform Is Built Upon a Mutually Beneficial Partnership
The platform encourages people to help each other by buying keys and spreading the word about each other’s accounts. It stimulates key sales and helps attract a new audience.
Heavy Reliance on Influencers
People tend to follow the advice of opinion leaders who have credibility in their eyes. Thus, the decision of the Friend. Tech’s team to establish partnerships with many influencers was a smart one.
Interestingly, Friend.Tech did not rely only on influencers from the crypto community. NBA player Grayson Allen and even models from OnlyFans expressed interest in the platform. This way, Friend.Tech can attract a wider audience than most other Web3 projects.
Invite-Only Registration
This may be counter-intuitive since, at first glance, invite-only registration limits the audience. However, exclusivity spurs the public interest and makes the platform much more desirable.
Involvement of the Crypto Community
Friend.Tech did not neglect the crypto community, however. The team cooperated with Paradigm – a venture firm and incubator specializing in crypto – and targeted retrodrops hunters in their marketing. In combination with using Base L2 solution, these efforts allowed Friend.Tech to fully leverage the crypto community and get a lot of blockchain-savvy people involved in the viral promotion of their platform.
High Virality
The combination of the aforementioned marketing tactics made Friend.Tech extremely viral. Everybody talked about the project. Different groups of people focused on different aspects of the platform: some discussed earning opportunities, others promoted their pages or focused on new content publishing opportunities. But the project has been the focus of public conversations for quite some time.
Friend.Tech Problems
There are plenty of issues with Friend.Tech. After all, if everything was fine, we wouldn’t see a rapid decline in user activity and other metrics. Here are the largest and most glaring problems:
friend.tech Application Is Not Available in the Appstore
You can’t download the Friend.Tech application for iOS from the official store, which is available only on the project’s website. Usually, it is an indicator that the app has some serious problems. But most importantly – your device security is not guaranteed if you install the Friend.Tech app.
There Is No Anti-fraud Protection
Scammers can easily create a fake celebrity account, sell off collected keys, and thus collapse their market value.
There Is an Abundance of Bots
Friend.Tech is flooded with bots. The issue is even acknowledged by the developers who recently reported deleting over 600 thousand bot accounts.
There Is No Transparency
Friend.Tech does not release any technical details, including users’ data storage and protection.
Data Leak Scandal
There was a report stating that the data of over 100,000 users was leaked from the platform, although Friend.Tech denied this. Friend.Tech API, according to another report, also reveals data about users’ wallets (which is not normally publicly available).
There May Be Some Legal Issues
For the first 13 days after the release, “keys” were called “shares.” This fact attracted the attention of regulators, so the name was quickly changed. However, it is unclear whether this measure will help.
Conclusion
Friend.Tech is a textbook example of how Web3 projects grow and go into decline nowadays. An interesting idea, smart marketing, and effective promotion ensured rapid growth and impressive revenue in the first weeks after the release. However, failure to address major issues, holding the project back, inevitably led to a decline in user activity and public interest. It must be said that the initial growth gave Friend.Tech a “safety cushion,” so the platform still has time and resources to recover. Whether the team will be able to pull it off remains to be seen.
