{"id":37930,"date":"2023-10-15T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-15T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/?p=37930"},"modified":"2025-08-29T23:34:25","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T20:34:25","slug":"what-is-friend-tech-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/what-is-friend-tech-for\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Friend.Tech for?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

What is Friend.Tech?<\/h2>\n

Friend.Tech is a decentralised social app built on Coinbase\u2019s L2 Base<\/a>, integrated with X.<\/p>\n

The protocol lets users trade \u201ckeys\u201d \u2014 tokenised shares of user accounts. Holders gain access to private channels and exclusive content.<\/p>\n

After registering, users can sell their own shares to others or buy \u201ckeys\u201d to accounts they find interesting.<\/p>\n

The project bills itself as a \u201cmarketplace for your friends\u201d and, in effect, tokenises social influence using blockchain technology.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Who is behind it?<\/h2>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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

\n

How did Friend.Tech become popular?<\/h2>\n

Beyond its viral spread, there were concrete reasons for the crypto community\u2019s interest in the app. The most cited were:<\/p>\n

    \n
  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<\/a>. In the first days after opening, Base recorded an influx of 42,000 new users, reaching<\/a> a total of 136,000 users.<\/li>\n
  2. Support from influencers and senior managers at Coinbase. Among the first to promote Friend.Tech was Yuga Cohler<\/a>, a senior software engineer at Coinbase, who hailed the app\u2019s developers as pioneers of decentralised social networks. In addition, the network received<\/a> support from influential crypto personalities such as Cobie and Hsaka.<\/li>\n
  3. Interest from venture capital. Paradigm, known for investing in crypto startups, said<\/a> it supported Stealcam and, by extension, Friend.Tech.<\/li>\n
  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.<\/li>\n
  5. Celebrity attention. According to TechCrunch, the platform won interest beyond crypto influencers: NBA player Grayson Allen<\/a> and models<\/a> from OnlyFans showed interest.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n
    \n

    How is Friend.Tech developing?<\/h2>\n

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

    As of 15 October 2023, Defi Llama<\/a> 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\u2019s user base exceeded 960,000.<\/p>\n

    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.<\/p>\n

    Copycats also flooded the market. The most notable were Post.Tech on Arbitrum and Stars Arena \u2014 a clone on Avalanche that lost about $3 million to an exploit despite developers\u2019 assurances it had been fixed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    How Friend.Tech works and what helped it come back from \u2018clinical death\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"1","news_style_id":"1","cryptorium_level":"1","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2113],"tags":[1321,1179,465,1110],"class_list":["post-37930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cryptorium","tag-base","tag-layer-2-solutions","tag-social-media","tag-web-3-0"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"78","promo_type":"1","layout_type":"1","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37930"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37932,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37930\/revisions\/37932"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}