Friend.tech is one of the highly anticipated projects on the current Base chain, showing tremendous potential. In just under two weeks, its transaction volume has exceeded 25,633 ETH and attracted the participation of well-known individuals and venture capital companies. These additions have brought more exposure, social influence, and trust support to Friend.tech, making it a highly sought-after Web3 social platform. However, behind the popularity of Friend.tech, people are more concerned about its future direction. Previous SocialFi applications like BitClout have shown that early popularity does not guarantee long-term success. Although Friend.tech is excellent, it is still in its early stages of development and has not yet matured. Therefore, we need to deeply analyze Friend.tech's innovative features, competitive advantages, and current shortcomings to help us more accurately evaluate its future development potential.
What is FRIEND.TECH and why is it so popular?
FRIEND.TECH is a DApp based on the Base ecosystem. It allows users to buy and sell shares of users on Friend.tech using Ethereum on the Base chain, which is strongly tied to Twitter. Its main functionality is similar to WeChat and Telegram group chats, but its core lies in the organic process of joining and leaving group chats. Users can choose to join a specific group chat and purchase shares of that group at a base price. If they want to leave the group chat, they can sell their shares.
Joining a group chat not only satisfies social needs but also offers investment potential. As the number of users joining a group chat gradually increases, the total share supply of the group also increases, leading to an increase in the base price of each share. This means that joining a group chat not only fulfills social needs but also allows users to enjoy investment returns. Therefore, speculative users often buy shares of other promising group chats or their own affiliated group chats early on.
According to data from Dune Analytics, within less than 24 hours since the launch of the testing version of Friend.tech, it has attracted 7,860 users and a trading volume of 4,400 Ether (equivalent to $8.1 million), with over 126,000 transactions. This surpasses the trading volume of OpenSea during the same period. As of now, Friend.tech has garnered attention from over 100,000 users, with notable personalities such as Frank DeGods, Gainzy222, trader RookieXBT, and NBA player Grayson Allen joining this wave of excitement.
The reason why Friend.tech is so popular is due to market opportunities and marketing strategies. After the GameFi craze, the entire industry has been searching for the next application that can break traditional boundaries. As a field that combines traffic and encryption, SocialFi is considered one of the most promising directions for achieving a breakthrough. For a long time, people have been striving to use blockchain to create decentralized versions of Facebook (Meta) or Twitter (X), allowing users to own their own data and create an on-chain reputation system for social use cases. Friend.tech emerged at just the right time to cater to this market opportunity and demand.
Additionally, as a decentralized social application, Friend.tech has excelled in project marketing. Its marketing strategy combines the strengths of various approaches, with a focus on short-term, high-frequency, and intensive public relations tactics. Whether it's the content approach, timing selection, or community strategy, they are all considered classics. In the early stages, they focused on creating a sense of mystery to ignite users' curiosity. They then relied on influential Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to promote the product, leveraging their influence to attract more users. At the same time, they cleverly used invitation codes for viral marketing, stimulating users' desire to participate and guiding more people to join. Additionally, the endorsement of top-tier venture capitalists (VCs) further added to their success. It is the skillful implementation of all these strategies that has contributed to the current popularity of Friend.tech.
FRIEND.TECH: Product Features and Gameplay
Friend.tech is an innovative Web3 application that leads the revolution in the social field. It not only has advantages in marketing and promotion but also showcases its unique charm through carefully crafted product features. When implementing the KOL monetization solution, Friend.tech drew valuable lessons from BitClout. Compared to BitClout, which faced community resistance due to its forced launch and eventually integrated into the Deso project, Friend.tech embarked on innovation with the aim of protecting user rights and optimizing user experience. It adopts an approach of actively inviting KOLs to join and greatly enhances user experience through the use of Base chain L2 technology.
Friend.tech also demonstrates innovative charm in its product features and gameplay. The introduction of four innovative functions, including "Social Tokenization," "Share Trading," "Fan Economy," and more, brings users a completely new social interaction experience. These features are all built on a decentralized foundation, quantifying and unlocking social value through algorithms and market-oriented means, creating fresh opportunities for users.
Social Tokenization: Friend.tech quantifies users' popularity and interaction on Twitter as social tokens by associating their Twitter accounts. This mechanism of social tokenization makes users' influence a measurable and tradable asset, providing them with a direct way to participate and benefit from their influence. Through the social tokenization mechanism, users can turn their influence into tradable assets with actual value, further expanding the scope of their social impact.
Share Trading: Friend.tech allows users to purchase social token shares of other users using ETH, where these shares represent the ownership of popularity and interaction on Twitter. Users are free to decide when to buy or sell shares based on market supply and demand, and they can profit from it. This share trading mechanism provides users with a way to invest in and trade their social influence, enabling them to participate in the economic system of social networks and share the growth value of their social influence.
Fan Economy and Influence Game: Friend.tech creates a unique influence game with the fan economy at its core. Users can purchase shares of other users using ETH, gaining the privilege to engage in one-on-one conversations with the purchased users, which is called a friend spot. Buyers can chat with purchased users, showing support and actively engaging with their favorite social influencers. This design encourages users to actively participate in the interaction and development of social networks, transforming social influence into actual social interactions, enhancing connectivity and activity among users.
Transaction Fees and Revenue Sharing: Friend.tech charges additional transaction fees during the trading process, with a portion belonging to the protocol and another portion belonging to the shareholders involved in the transaction. For the social influencers (KOLs) whose shares are being purchased, they receive a certain percentage of transaction fees for each share bought or sold. This design encourages KOLs to increase transaction frequency to earn higher returns and promotes overall activity and liquidity in the social network.
FRIEND.TECH: How far can it go under a fleeting fame?
Friend.tech has brought users a new experience of participation, interaction, and value realization with its innovative social + economic model, unleashing a disruptive wave in the Web3 social field. It opens up a vibrant and opportunistic new social world for users, allowing both KOLs and ordinary users to gain richer social experiences and economic benefits through the platform.
However, beneath the surface prosperity of Friend.tech, we can see that there are still significant challenges on its development path. When it comes to the product itself, Friend.tech still has many unresolved issues: its sustainability is questionable, its business model needs to be tested, and it lacks attractiveness to top-tier KOLs, among other problems. These issues will affect how far Friend.tech can go in the short term under a fleeting fame.
Firstly, many people have doubts about the sustainability of Friend.tech. They question issues such as the lack of a clear privacy policy, the requirement to deposit Ethereum during registration, and the unclear project roadmap. These factors raise concerns about the security and long-term development of Friend.tech. In particular, the lack of clear privacy terms has led to concerns about the security of personal information, causing users to hesitate when providing personal information to Friend.tech.
Secondly, the business model of Friend.tech needs further validation. The application relies on the economic interaction between KOLs and fans for monetization, where fans can purchase shares of KOLs to gain the privilege of engaging in conversation with them. However, the problem lies in the fact that owning shares does not guarantee a response from KOLs, as it solely depends on their personal willingness. In this model, KOLs are not obligated to respond to fans. As a result, Friend.tech faces the dilemma of "paying to message but not necessarily receiving a reply," similar to sending a private message on Twitter without the obligation for the recipient to respond. This makes Friend.tech's functionality more like a facade, and fans can only achieve benefits by continuously buying new shares and waiting for others to take over, raising doubts about the sustainability of the monetization model.
Furthermore, there are significant doubts about whether Friend.tech can attract enough KOLs to join. Although there are many KOLs sharing Friend.tech invite codes on Twitter, top-tier KOLs do not lack monetization channels, and they are more concerned about the potential dissatisfaction of their fans due to the volatile nature of tokens, which could affect their influence on other platforms like Twitter. As for medium and small-scale KOLs, their influence is limited, and even if they join Friend.tech, it is challenging for them to obtain substantial profits through the platform.
Apart from the aforementioned issues, Friend.tech also has a potential drawback:
1. Lack of competitive product features: Friend.tech suffers from severe interface glitches and insufficient functionality, which directly affects the user experience. For example, issues with loading chat content and a lack of common features (such as photo sharing) limit users from having a comprehensive social experience on Friend.tech. While Friend.tech has expanded its community features and offers KOL-exclusive VIP content, traditional platforms like Telegram, WeChat, and Discord already fulfill these needs and have more mature and robust functionalities, making them more sticky for users. In comparison, Friend.tech does not have any apparent advantages.
2. Lack of transparency and planning: Despite being live for almost two weeks, Friend.tech has not yet released its whitepaper and roadmap. This creates a vague and opaque impression, weakening people's confidence in Friend.tech's future development. Users and investors want clear insight into Friend.tech's vision, plans, and direction, and the lack of this information raises concerns and uncertainty.
3.Compliance Risk: With the rapid development of Web3, regulatory agencies are paying increasing attention to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Friend.tech's business model is somewhat similar to the stock market, where crypto influencers can share profits with buyers to increase transaction volume and prices. This could potentially expose Friend.tech to compliance risk of being considered an unregistered security by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Overall, as a Web3 social application, Friend.tech's pricing model for personal influence tokens exhibits a trend of FOMO (fear of missing out). With good airdrop expectations and marketing promotions by key opinion leaders (KOLs), Friend.tech may be able to maintain some level of popularity in the short term. However, in the long run, this trend driven solely by sentiment is not sustainable. Once the hype cools down, users will return to focusing on the product itself and start noticing Friend.tech's own flaws. If Friend.tech fails to successfully establish a genuine connection between fans and KOLs, and optimize its product structure and business model, its future growth potential will be greatly limited. In the future, Friend.tech may follow in the footsteps of BitClout and fail to achieve lasting development.
