FRIEND.TECH: a New Playground for Crypto Influencers?

These days everyone is talking about friend.tech.

When I first heard about it and took a look at what it was about I had yet another deja vu. In my mind I immediately went back to the times when the BitClout launched. I was getting very similar vibes so decided to check what made FriendTech different and if it was something people should be excited about at all…

We often fall into the same trap because we either 1. were not around when something similar happened in the past or 2. we have a memory of goldfish… or maybe simply 3. we’re just extremely greedy?

Let’s go back and see what was BitClout first.

BitClout is an open source blockchain-based social media platform. On the platform, users can post short-form writings and photos, award money to posts they particularly like by clicking a diamond icon, as well as buy and sell "creator coins" (personalized tokens whose value depends on people's reputations).

_Wikipedia

It’s investors included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm Social Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Winklevoss Capital Management, Alexis Ohanian, Polychain, Pantera, and Digital Currency Group (CoinDesk's parent company).

It was launched publicly in March, 2021. There were few things that were completely wrong with the whole idea and how they implemented it.

• They scraped 15,000 celebrity profiles from twitter and reserved those accounts for them. If I am not mistaken people could buy and trade their shares even if they were not on the platform. People could claim their accounts by tweeting about it - which in case of celebrities was perceived as an endorsement.

  Later that brought a backlash from some celebrities and even a lawsuit.

• At the initial launch people could buy the tokens with Bitcoin… BUT there was no off-ramp and any legal way to sell those tokens back and “cash out”. So that was done unofficially OTC through Discords and Twitter etc. This obviously was a favourable environment for scammers taking advantage of people who did not know better.

The prices of each account's "creator coin" goes up and down with the popularity of the celebrity behind it. For example, if someone says something negative, the value of their corresponding account may go down.

_Wikipedia

• The above encouraged toxic behaviour since the classic FUD strategy used for shitcoins was valid here too. In this scenario you would FUD your competitor or an influencer you hated. The opposite worked too…

  So pump and dump strategy many were already good at worked in here well.

Anyway - won’t go too deep into details here, but there are couple of videos from Coffeezilla if you’d like to dive deeper.

Ok now let’s go to FriendTech and see what happens here…

And that’s so true - the first days were full of praise and media coverage about the impressive growth… but then some people got out of the hype and FOMO spell and voiced out concerns.

So let’s see what’s happening:

The platform’s beta launch was on August 11, 2023.

The positive:

• It’s the most successful/popular project on the Base Network (Coinbase’s new Layer 2)

• generated over $1 million in fees in 24 hours on Aug. 19, outperforming Uniswap and the Bitcoin network (at the time of writing this around $2.8 million since its launch)

• 650k transactions and more than 60,000 unique traders/users

Below are the users with highest share prices: (Note: looks like Racer is the founder)

Ok now let’s look at what’s probably way more important.

The negative

• Utility

Looks like in this bear market this is a good playground for influencers to make some money… but what’s the “utility” of their shares?

Looks like the buyers will have access to private chats with the them and also consume exclusive content - eg. alpha, etc…

And we all know what happens when the token is “useless”, right? Yup it is used purely for speculation and trading…

• Privacy

This one is probably one of the biggest concerns among the community.

Yes I understand when you get into a FOMO mode your brain switches off and your guards are non-existaning… but still…

So what does the privacy T&C says on their website?

Hoops!

And I am not the only one seeing this:

I don’t know about you, but I am not OK with this.

Now let’s look into what happens with your Twitter

Here are the permissions you are granting: source here

So revoking access may be a good idea.

And finally - looks like people can identify your wallet and link it to your identity.

Maybe you don’t care and it’s fine. But I think we should have been informed about it before signing up, no?

Oh wait… it will probably be in the privacy T&C when it finally is published?

• Raised concerns about…

the team

the investor

Will let you decide whether it’s something you’d like be part of or not. To be fair, there are many who truly enjoy being on friend.tech and engage with their “shareholders” in private chats.

Just final food for thought before I leave you (and these are just ideas/speculations to open a discussion - NOT backed up by facts, just thoughts flying in my head)

• it’s a bear market and not much is happening now - so maybe many users jumped on friend.tech cause there isn’t much else to do… (remember Clubhouse during pandemic times?) and once things become more exciting they’ll jump on the next new shiny thing…

• maybe some influencers people would like to connect to are open to a more “genuine” engagement and conversations with their friends.tech “shareholders” and this is the only way to build real relationship with them?

• even if it' doesn’t last for long there might still be opportunity to make money?…

• no matter how things develop this will definitely impact your reputation and personal brand one way or another

• in my head this is another exchange… exchange of what though? … Does this mean that now you are the shitcoin?…

And let’s wrap with this

Have a great week Rebels!