What is Friend.Tech for?

What is Friend.Tech?

Friend.Tech is a decentralised social app built on Coinbase’s L2 Base, integrated with X.

The protocol lets users trade “keys” — tokenised shares of user accounts. Holders gain access to private channels and exclusive content.

After registering, users can sell their own shares to others or buy “keys” to accounts they find interesting.

The project bills itself as a “marketplace for your friends” and, in effect, tokenises social influence using blockchain technology.

Who is behind it?

At the end of March 2023 two developers, known as 0xracerAlt and Shrimp, launched a Web3 social network for media-sharing, Stealcam. In 2022 Racer created the DAO Tweet DAO, integrated with Twitter and granting access to accounts through ownership of special NFTs.

Stealcam proposed the following pricing model for content. The first user gets a copy free; the second pays 0.001 ETH; each subsequent buyer pays 10% more than the previous one.

In May 2023, after a sharp drop in revenue, the developers decided to rename the project Friend.Tech, according to Coindesk. Initially the platform was slated to launch on Arbitrum, but a few months later it went live on Base instead.

How did Friend.Tech become popular?

Beyond its viral spread, there were concrete reasons for the crypto community’s interest in the app. The most cited were:

1. Choosing Base, an L2, as the launch platform. Public access to the network opened on 9 August 2023. This drew researchers and hunters of retroactive airdrops. In the first days after opening, Base recorded an influx of 42,000 new users, reaching a total of 136,000 users.
2. Support from influencers and senior managers at Coinbase. Among the first to promote Friend.Tech was Yuga Cohler, a senior software engineer at Coinbase, who hailed the app’s developers as pioneers of decentralised social networks. In addition, the network received support from influential crypto personalities such as Cobie and Hsaka.
3. Interest from venture capital. Paradigm, known for investing in crypto startups, said it supported Stealcam and, by extension, Friend.Tech.
4. Invitation-only onboarding. The team implemented an invite-only mechanism. To create an account, users must receive an invite from existing members, and only a handful of codes are issued daily. This created a clubby feel that also piqued curiosity among crypto users.
5. Celebrity attention. According to TechCrunch, the platform won interest beyond crypto influencers: NBA player Grayson Allen and models from OnlyFans showed interest.

How is Friend.Tech developing?

According to a dashboard on Dune, by mid-October 2023 the app had logged almost 11 million transactions, and users and influencers had earned more than $21 million in fees.

As of 15 October 2023, Defi Llama showed total value locked in the protocol of about $44 million, with roughly 70,600 daily active unique addresses. At the same time, Friend.Tech’s user base exceeded 960,000.

In its first few weeks the project suffered a data leak affecting more than 100,000 users and a SIM-swapping attack, during which some users lost not only digital assets worth thousands of dollars but also all points in the bonus programme due to bugs in the protocol.

Copycats also flooded the market. The most notable were Post.Tech on Arbitrum and Stars Arena — a clone on Avalanche that lost about $3 million to an exploit despite developers’ assurances it had been fixed.