With all of the different Friend.tech forks that have been released over the past couple of months, it was only a matter of time before we saw one arrive on the Bitcoin blockchain — enter New Bitcoin City. Literally marketed as the “Friend.Tech of Bitcoin,” New Bitcoin City or “NBC” for short, is attempting to literally make a Bitcoin City which has it’s own districts for different web3 needs:
https://newbitcoincity.com/story
New Bitcoin City’s dive into Friend.tech-like SocialFi has only been out for the past week or so, but technically NBC’s initial launch was nearly 3 months ago, with more of a focus on gaming and NFT auctions (more on this later). NBC then came out with the “Alpha” app which about a month ago morphed into the New Bitcoin City App.
With its recent integrations of Friend.tech-like SocialFi ponzinomics, undoubtedly it is capturing the hearts (and wallets) of BTC and ETH-maxis alike, as its TVL has exploded has grown significantly in the past two weeks:
https://defillama.com/protocol/new-bitcoin-city?devMetrics=false&devCommits=false
If you’re reading this I’m assuming that you’re already somewhat familiar with the Friend.tech model, however for those of you that aren’t. Friend.Tech is a SocialFi platform which allows the shareholders (or “keyholders”) access to the influencer through chats, and also gives direct monetary value to the influencer themselves. However in addition to the monetary streams gained from key/share transfers, part of why Friend.tech has generated so much hype is due to the speculated airdrops that will be coming potentially once the beta period is over. New Bitcoin City’s framework is extremely similar, but with a few significant differences:
It’s takes Bitcoin (Duh)
Starting out with the obvious, NBC takes native $BTC, but it also takes $AVAX on Avalanche and $ETH from both Ethereum mainnet and Base:
Regardless of what you choose to deposit, your wallet denomination will show up in $BTC, as will all payments and fee accruals. With the horribly declining BTC/ETH ratio, it may be important to point out however that it appears your deposited $ETH/$AVAX won’t actually get converted into $BTC. Instead NBC spins up your own respective wallets from which you can conduct your transactions on the platform.
Security
Even in their short lifespans, many users on Friend.tech have gotten simswapped and/or hacked and on Starsarena there have already been multiple contract exploits which cause the platform outages for days. NBC on the other hand requires no deposits or e-mails to use, and has already gotten an audit completed by PeckShield on October 20th with no critical issues identified. Now to be clear, an audit never can guarantee security, but it can/should decrease the likelihood of low-hanging-fruit attacks.
Fractionalized Keys
One of the significant drawbacks about Friend.Tech is the Share/Keyholder bonding-curve, which scales up pretty significantly into the thousands of dollars, making the price easily go into the 100’s of dollars by just the 40th-or-so key that’s purchased:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18tpr7XzHevwrTFZ43nuieEqN87IhdDF75ALIG7ffvmg/edit#gid=0
What NBC has done instead is make a fractionalized key system where you can buy keys in as little as 0.1 denominations:
Instead of needing 1 whole key for your favorite influencer, the influencer can setup the threshold (lower or higher) that is required to access your content and DM you:
Now instead of needing to pay potentially thousands of dollars to gain access to the top influencers, with NBC you can literally do it for a fraction of the price.
Fees for the Community, not for the Team
What really I think is the most important standout of NBC’s fee structure is that the NBC doesn’t take any fees, nor do they intend to take any future potential platform airdrop points. Instead of a standard 10% fee (1/2 to creators, 1/2 to FT) that you’d see on Friend.tech, NBC gives up to a 4:1 ratio, up to 8% for content creators and 2% to the NBC treasury:
The 8% of creator earnings is controlled by the content creator themselves, and they could set any ratio that they want (even 0%). From what I could gather, the 2% in treasury fees are currently “paid to referrers to grow the user base,” as well as promotional incentives such as Red Packets. Speaking of…
Features for Content Creators
By far the foremost thing that I think is interesting about NBC are the different features that they’re building out for creators. Apart from the features that we already see on FT, these include:
Red Packets — taken from East Asian countries, usually a Red Packet symbolizes a gift of money, or in this case, $BTC that can be distributed to keyholders
Lucky Wheels — just as it sounds, a spin-the-wheel game where users can win $BTC that can be used to buy others’ keys at random:
Jam Sessions — basically a voice chat room where you can speak directly with your influencer
Integrated SocialFi Universe
In addition to the features for content creators, right now there are several integrations with other SoFi apps that could make NBC extremely dominant. These include:
Sweep Key Feature — connected across different SoFi apps, allows you to buy keys/sweep floors on other platforms
(3,3) buys — instead of having to keep tweeting out that you’ll buy up keys below a certain price, now you can simply do this automatically:
Circles — essentially the same thing as FT’s chats, except NBC’s UI allows you to access all the most recent messages in each of your chats all at once, straight onto your dashboard.
Roadmap 
As I mentioned before, NBC wasn’t originally created to be FT fork, and NBC has a pretty big vision for what they want the platform to be. Literally built to be a web3 city, there are many “neighborhoods” that they want to build out to provide the following:
Generative Village — a BRC-20 NFT marketplace
DeFi District — a place to explore different Dapps (DEXes, bridges, etc.) built on Bitcoin
Perceptrons Square — all things AI on Bitcoin
Fantasy Land — all things Metaverse on Bitcoin
Essentially with all of these elements combined (and more), they’re trying to build a generative city where anyone can get exposure to everything that $BTC is able to offer.
Other Takes and Considerations
The fact that NBC has just recently hit $2 million TVL is impressive, but it also shows that we’re still extremely early. For comparison’s sake, Friend.Tech has a TVL of more than $40 million, which means that it’s currently 20x’s the size. Here are some other takes and consideration I have so far exploring NBC:
Building fast means that things can easily be broken: It’s clear from reading their audit that NBC has been built very well…so far. In addition, it’s very apparent that the team is working extremely hard and fast to ship out new and cool features. (Case in point — the Lucky Spin Wheel I mentioned was just released today at time of writing). I would imagine that going forward, new features might cause new exploitable issues to exist, so I’m hoping that the NBC is supplanting their new features with the same due diligence in security as they have been so far. And speaking of building fast…
Holy Hell Are There a Lot of Bugs:
…and I’m not the only one that thinks so. If you pop over in their Discord, you’ll see tons of people reporting delayed transactions, or transactions not going through at all, UI not showing the correct data, etc. I imagine that many of these issues are pretty solvable.
Personally I’m not keen on using phone to do DeFi, so I am appreciative of the fact that NBC can be accessed via mobile app and on desktop, however the desktop asks me to re-login through my phone every 2 minutes…which is pretty annoying.
Point System: Similar to point systems like you’ll see on other FT forks, NBC has their own point accrual system which the details on how to accrue are left secret. As far as I could tell, there’s no specifics on how/when these points will be airdropped.
Conclusion
Just like I had reservations about the longevity of Friend.Tech, my feelings are similar to New Bitcoin City. Having said that, I think it’s very apparent that NBC truly has made efforts to take the next evolutionary step into SocialFi, and I have a feeling that it might grow even faster and larger given its potential appeal to BTC-maximalists.
If you haven’t checked out New Bitcoin City yourself, I’d recommend you trying it out as its free to do so. And if you’re so inclined, consider supporting this blog and use my referral link: https://newbitcoincity.com?referral=dxcv
Also if you still haven’t gotten around to trying out Friend.tech, I recently got a few new invite codes if you want to check that out as well:
ft-0qd9shl3
ft-1f78x3kr
ft-2q17lole
Ands always, thanks for taking the time to read this and be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. If you want to get access to all my draft links or get an idea about what’s next on my docket before I publish, find me on Friend.tech (and now New Bitcoin City), where if you’re a keyholder, I share all that information in my chatroom. Also, looking for a gift for your Crypto-loving/hating friend? Give them a REKT journal to cheer them up!
Disclaimer: And as a final reminder, this is not financial advice and this is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Please as always, do your own research and find what investments are best for you. Cheers everyone!
