Hey folks, if you’ve been following Crypto Twitter lately, you’ve undoubtedbly heard of Friend.tech, a web3 social platform which has gained literally overnight hype and traction, boosting Base, Ethereum’s most popular L2, which has caused an exponential rise in user activity and TVL:
Even considering that it’s still technically in Beta, Friend.tech is extremely easy to use (albeit slightly glitchy) but that hasn’t stopped the amount of activity that it’s been creating:
Digesting a lot of the content and analyses out there, I’ve come up with a few observations and predictions for what in store for Friend.tech’s future.
But first, let’s dive a bit into what Friend.tech actually is…
What is Friend.tech?
Friend tech is self-described as a “home for financial X [Twitter] social experiences” that gives X social media influencers and other users a “platform for new, fun features focused on playing with friends and money.” There have been multiple prior attempts to launch a web3 crypto-based platform, yet Friend.tech is unique in the fact that it’s a “Progressive Web App” meaning that it’s setup to be an app on your smartphone without going through your phone’s app store:
What the Progressive Web App looks created via the Brave Browser
Why is this significant? App stores on your iOS or android collect up to 30% in revenue, which gives the trading/exchanging of assets such as $ETH or $BTC trades a horrible value proposition for developers and users. By making the Friend.tech platform a PWA, users are able to transact easily without the 30% haircut. In addition to the ingenious workaround, once you sign up you are given a social token or share now called “keys.” Other people can buy one of your keys where in theory the keys allow them access to private chat rooms with you
Assuming they have enough $ETH, anyone can buy or sell a key of another (or their own) which will can affect the overall key’s price, with a 10% transaction fee — 5% going to the Friend.tech team and 5% going to the X-influencer. The prices of keys are purely speculative yet have made many people a lot of money through buying and selling. Speculation on price have cause many influencers’ keys to get into the 1–2 $ETH price range:
In other words if I wanted to buy one of Cobie’s keys, I’d have to spend almost 2 $ETH ($3500 dollars at time of writing), which I could use to gain access to Cobie’s chatroom.
Just in case if you’re curious how the pricing scales out:
In a nutshell key prices significantly rise as there are more people that buy . The 1000th share that gets bought would be sold for 62.5 $ETH…that’s a pretty penny.
What makes Friend.tech so popular?
In just over a couple week’s time, Friend.tech has amassed more than 45,000 unique traders and more than 15,000 $ETH in total volume, and as of right now…it doesn’t like there’s any signs of it slowing down:
As I’ve alluded to before, Friend.tech theoretically 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. As of late last week, the first share of “reward points” were allocated off-chain for app users, which should be released in 6 months.:
The price of these rewards points are unknown, however many are speculating due to their partnership with Paradigm earlier this year, that prospective airdrop tokens might actually be worth something significant. (If you’re unfamiliar with Paradigm, they’re one of the VC firms that have been linked to prior massive airdrops such as Uniswap and DyDx).
My Observations…
Personally I have some mixed feelings about Friend.tech, but I do have to say that it’s extremely easy to use, and overall that it’s just…fun. Back in the early 2000’s I attended a college that was luckily one of the first 20 universities to get access to Facebook, and honestly it gives me the same vibes as the super-limited Facebook did back then. Will Friend.tech be the next Facebook? Not sure. But here are some of my takes going forward:
The Workaround will be Worked around
Regardless of how clever the Friend.Tech team has been with creating an app-like protocol to avoid big brother Apple/Google fees, I would imagine that as more and more PWA’s gain more traction over time, that this workaround will one day be shutdown. With this PWA loophole being exploited, whether it be crypto-related or not, there is little incentive for any company to lose 30% of its profit to Google or Apple and I would imagine that many companies will start drifting towards the progressive web app route. In response, it would make sense for Apple/Google to release an update to hammer down on the ability to create PWA’s, thus causing the accessibility for platforms like Friend.Tech to die out.
Sure, people will probably still find a way to find access by jailbreaking their phones, yet there are many associated risk factors with jailbreaking such as voiding of warranties or disruptions to other highly used services such as Apple Pay or Facetime. My guess is that it’s only a matter of time that these restrictions are put in place, changing the nature of Friend.Tech’s usability and popularity.
As of right now Friend.tech isn’t very scalable
Compared to the normie-world, Crypto-twitter is an extremely small bubble with top influencers only having barely a hundredth of the following:
By comparison, some of the top holders of X-influencers such as @cobie have key-prices that are at about 2 $ETH ($3500 dollars) with about 140 holders. By comparison there are other influencers such as Christian2022.mid that have 15 holders at a key-price of 1.20 $ETH ($2000 dollars). If people like Cobie are already priced out in the 1,000’s of dollars range, for 140 shares, it’s hard to imagine that there’s enough money to go around for someone that would be at least in the 1000-share range, say like Justin Bieber or Cristiano Ronaldo.
Privacy Concerns
There are quite a few privacy concersn floating around on Twitter about Friend.tech, but these are perhaps the biggest and most significant ones:
1) Lack of ownership of private keys — this is a bit of a double-edged sword because the app is extremely easy to use, but the problem is that you do not have ownership of your private keys. Friend.tech has alleged that they “never [have] access to your private keys,” and that they use Privy MPC wallets, yet as the old adage goes, “if it’s not your keys…
2) There is no privacy policy — as of at least during this time of writing, the link to the Privacy Policy page gives a pop-up message saying “Coming Soon.” As someone that’s been scammed in the past, I actually don’t think that privacy policies actually hold their weight in words, but something would be better than nothing.
3) Doxxed wallet addresses — Let me be clear, using Friend.tech doesn’t mean that you’ll get doxxed, but creating an account does require you to not only link your X account, but also your e-mail address too. All of this information is available in their public API:
Conclusion
Although there may be a few concerns, my take is that a lot of these issues won’t be that big of a deal if Friend.tech goes mainstream. Most people (including nearly all my friends and family) don’t even know what a private key is, have never read a privacy policy for probably any app they have on their phone, and aren’t anonymous on their social media accounts. Does this make these concerns not valid? I don’t think so — all I'm saying is that Crypto Twitter can be a bit paranoid at times.
Also, regardless of how you might feel about Friend.tech, it’s important to remember that things trend quickly in crypto, and right now Friend.tech is the hottest thing since sliced bread. It’s debatable about how long Friend.tech will stay in the public eye, but the hype and conversation that it has started makes it strongly apparent that we may have uncovered perhaps some of the first steps of what a genuine web3 social platform might look like.
Invite Codes
As lastly, as promised…if you’re interested in trying out Friend.tech yourself, I do have some invite codes to share which I will try to keep updated as much as possible:
f̶t̶-̶g̶9̶w̶v̶e̶v̶z̶h̶
̶f̶t̶-̶m̶x̶5̶z̶y̶6̶j̶i̶
̶f̶t̶-̶i̶g̶3̶g̶y̶w̶e̶c̶
̶f̶t̶-̶4̶4̶v̶w̶u̶p̶f̶e̶
f̶t̶-̶2̶0̶e̶4̶5̶d̶u̶s̶
f̶t̶-̶m̶h̶e̶7̶b̶z̶d̶a̶
̶f̶t̶-̶4̶8̶6̶4̶f̶5̶9̶w̶
f̶t̶-̶p̶1̶y̶2̶t̶7̶5̶z̶
̶f̶t̶-̶8̶b̶3̶z̶j̶e̶y̶v̶
f̶t̶-̶0̶2̶0̶r̶n̶w̶f̶v̶
̶f̶t̶-̶t̶0̶h̶m̶t̶w̶3̶s̶
̶f̶t̶-̶x̶q̶8̶j̶y̶d̶3̶r̶
f̶t̶-̶j̶b̶a̶2̶t̶9̶1̶o̶
f̶t̶-̶m̶g̶k̶5̶6̶1̶l̶h̶
f̵t̵-̵u̵8̵3̵8̵s̵g̵h̵r̵
f̵t̵-̵m̵n̵w̵k̵8̵x̵s̵r̵
f̵t̵-̵o̵k̵p̵j̵6̵1̵q̵6̵
̵f̵t̵-̵0̵8̵f̵h̵8̵6̵n̵9̵
f̵t̵-̵u̵9̵4̵7̵3̵k̵o̵2̵
̵f̵t̵-̵t̵q̵l̵w̵y̵7̵p̵h̵
̵f̵t̵-̵j̵b̵j̵1̵i̵g̵1̵4̵
f̵t̵-̵t̵q̵l̵w̵y̵7̵p̵h̵
ft-1f78x3kr
ft-2q17lole
ft-0qd9shl3
And buy one of my keys! I’m super cheap 😀
Thank you everyone for continuing to be part of this journey with me and for taking the time to read this. Be sure to follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/CryptosWith) to get all my latest updates. 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!
