Community notes the ‘death’ of Friend.Tech

Less than three weeks after launch, activity metrics for the new Web3-social network Friend.Tech have sharply declined. Market participants said the project was ‘dead’.

According to DeFi Llama, on August 21 fees in the protocol peaked at $1.7 million, but by August 26 had fallen by more than 87% — to $215,000.

The number of transactions on Friend.Tech also fell by more than 90% — from 525,000 to 51,000, according to the Dune dashboard.

The number of active buyers and sellers also dropped sharply — from a peak of 5,500 users to 550 at present.

Additionally, inflows of funds declined from $16.8 million to $1.6 million — almost 90.5%.

Friend.Tech launched on 10 August on the Ethereum-based layer-2 Base, supported by Coinbase. It is a decentralized social platform integrated with X (formerly Twitter), which allows tokenising participant profiles.

According to Coinbase risk manager Lisandro Rodriguez, the platform is ‘dead’ due to ‘greed and poor execution’. He also highlighted bot issues and widespread fraud.

‘The technology behind Friend.Tech was indeed a clever idea for giving people the opportunity to interact with celebrities. It was a way to create an inner circle where a user could buy access and converse with their favourite authors. However, the platform’s structure ultimately led to its decline,’ added a Coinbase spokesperson.

In July, Bluesky — a decentralized alternative to X, supported by co-founder and former CEO of the social network Jack Dorsey — closed a seed round of financing totaling $8 million.