Author: Mia, ChainCatcher
Editor: Marco, ChainCatcher
Amid the turbulence of Web3 social networks, an announcement from the Friend.tech protocol has caused a stir in the market. Recently, its co-founder (alias Racer) posted on social media, hinting at the intention to migrate the Friend.tech protocol from the current Base platform, and this news immediately caused the price of the protocol's native token FRIEND to fall sharply. According to CoinGecko data, on the day of the announcement, the price of FRIEND fell to $1.01, a 24-hour drop of 32.2%.
According to on-chain data, the address of "Big Brother Machi" Huang Licheng has used a total of 4,873 ETH (about $15.35 million) to buy FRIEND, with an average price of $1.9, and has currently suffered a floating loss of $7.54 million. There are still only a few projects that are facing the risk of being cut by Maji, and the crypto community has also heard that Friend.tech is "dead", so what happened to Friend.tech, which once dominated SocialFi?
On the afternoon of May 26, Eastern Time, Racer publicly expressed his desire to leave the network Base created by Coinbase in his post, and clearly proposed a "system design bounty" plan, promising that if someone can find a way to smoothly migrate the Friend.tech protocol from Base while ensuring that it will not cause major problems to users and can ensure the stable operation of the system, then they will pay the solution provider a bounty of up to $200,000.
In another post, Racer explained in detail the source of the tension between the Friend.tech team and the Base platform. He pointed out that due to the misunderstanding and smearing of Friend.tech by Farcaster's investors, as well as the pressure they exerted on the team and users, Friend.tech suffered exclusion in the Base community. This tense relationship has caused the Friend.tech team to consider looking for a new platform to support the continued development of its protocol.
The relevant posts are currently inaccessible, and Racer's X account has been blocked after posting.
In response, Jesse Pollak, head of Coinbase's Base, expressed understanding. Pollak admitted in the post that the Friend.tech team had experienced feelings of isolation and loss, and said that no matter which path they chose, he would support them. Pollak wrote: "If the team decides to leave Base, I will be very sad, but I also respect and support any path-this is the beauty of decentralized, on-chain economy."
Since its launch on August 10, 2023, Friend.tech has quickly become one of the most watched dApps on the base layer, with more than 200,000 users and a transaction volume of US$230 million.
Friend.tech is closely integrated with X to obtain the user's Web2 identity, allowing users to obtain potential benefits based on this identity, and by converting user influence into tradable "key" tokens, allowing users to directly obtain the attention or influence of creators. This model has attracted a wide range of users, including NBA player Grayson Allen, well-known cryptocurrency tycoons Cobie and Gainzy, and well-known trader RookieXBT are all members of the Friend.tech community.
As one of the most successful Web3 decentralized applications in SocialFi, Friend.tech has earned more than $2 million in the first month of its launch and net deposits of $33 million.
But as the novelty fades, the daily revenue of the Friend.tech protocol has fallen below $20,000 in the past few months. On-chain data shows that Friend.tech's daily activity has dropped significantly since it peaked on September 13 last year (a single-day transaction volume of 539,810).
Despite the challenge of declining data, the expectation of airdrops and the anticipation for the V2 version have continued to increase the popularity of Friend.tech. The native token FRIEND was launched on May 3 this year, and the price once reached $3.26 on the same day (a historical record). According to Dune data, the protocol's daily revenue on May 3 also exceeded $500,000.
However, with the realization of favorable conditions, the on-chain activity has begun to calm down, and the coin price has also fallen. Less than 30 days after FRIEND went online, it has fallen 65% from its previous high point.
Without the vision of the white paper, the token FRIEND has gone from "big hair" to "big cut", and the so-called "bottom-fishing" has become bottomless. As the price of the currency "continues to fall", Friend.tech has also been dragged into the abyss.
After the short-term benefits were realized, Friend.tech fell into silence again. How to save the project and let it return to the user's vision, at this time, a burst point is needed, and Lianchuang Racer pointed the spearhead at the Base chain itself.
Racer said that Friend.tech was labeled as "negative speculation" in the Base community, which made the team excluded and isolated in Base, and indirectly attributed most of the development difficulties of Friend.tech to Base.
In fact, at the beginning of Base, Friend.tech was another veteran project that ignited the Base ecosystem after Bald, and the success of Friend.tech was also inseparable from the early hype of the Base network. Base provided strong technical support for Friend.tech.
The Base mainnet was launched on August 9, 2023. By August 11 (the day Friend.tech was launched), its TVL had reached 180 million US dollars. With the release of Friend.tech, Base's TVL rose to 243 million US dollars on August 23.
Friend.tech and Base seemed to be a complementary partnership at the beginning. Jesse Pollak, head of Base, has also publicly stated that Friend.tech has made a significant contribution to Base's on-chain data, and on-chain social applications such as Friend.tech will be an "important part" of Base's ultimate goal.
The seemingly good cooperative relationship between the two parties began to crack after the new decentralized social network Farcaster landed on Base.
This year, with the outbreak of the Base ecosystem, Farcaster ushered in a wave of strong growth, and the influx of a large number of new users brought an increase in protocol revenue.
On the contrary, with the decline in popularity brought about by the Friend.tech asset issuance mechanism last year and the continued decline in activity within the economy, a large number of users flowed to Farcaster, which is also on the Base chain. Therefore, Friend.tech co-founders also attributed the reason for parting ways with Base to the "misunderstanding and smear" of Farcaster users.
Friend.tech's co-founder Racer, as a Web3 serial entrepreneur, began to try to get involved in the decentralized social field as early as 2022.
As the hype wave of TweetDAO gradually subsided, Racer and a developer named Shrimp/Shrimppepe co-created the Web3 decentralized social platform Stealcam, which was launched on Arbitrum in March 2023. It aims to reveal the "mystery" of its NFTs by converting user selfies and static images into pixelated NFT images in a paid form.
"Steal" is like buying, but users do not need the seller's consent. The first person to "Steal" an NFT can get it completely free, but all subsequent stealers must pay to display the image. If your NFT is "Stealed", you will suddenly find that you have more ETH in your wallet, but the image is gone.
Unlike the “TweetDAO Egg”, Stealcam algorithmically increases the secondary sale price, and users who “Steal” an image from the original thief must pay 0.001 ETH, and each subsequent “Steal” of the same image costs 0.001 ETH plus 10% more than the previous one, with no price cap.
Similar to the profit split of Friend.tech, in Stealcam, previous NFT holders will receive the fees they paid for the “Steal” image, as well as 45% of the difference between the new stolen price and the previous stolen price, and another 45% of the difference belongs to the image creator, and the remaining 10% belongs to the protocol.
However, when Stealcam faced a serious decline in creator income, the development team decided to make changes, and Stealcam’s mechanism and model became the predecessor of Friend.tech.
Faced with the failure of Stealcam, Racer did not intend to restart, but renamed the previous Stealcam to Friend.tech in May last year and launched it on Base.
In order to strengthen social attributes, Friend.tech released V2 on March 3, 2024, aiming to strengthen user management and interaction through CLUB, and all transactions within CLUB use tokens FRIEND, charging a fee of 1.5% for each transaction.
From TweetDAO to Friend.tech, Racer is keen on the SocialFi track, and prefers to maximize the asset issuance attributes in it, but each project seems to be unable to escape the "Ponzi" death cycle of high opening and low closing. At present, Friend.tech is also on a downward trend as a whole.
It is worth noting that Friend.tech has not had a detailed roadmap or white paper since its birth, and all of this seems too casual for a project that wants to develop in the long term. It is difficult for users not to classify Friend.tech as another "trial and error" of Racer.
Racer has always emphasized the "Fi" in SocialFi, rather than the real Social, so in terms of network construction, Friend.tech is just a refinement and strengthening of Twitter's social network, and the form is still a closed network with a single node as the core.
In addition, Friend.tech's high registration threshold limits the development of its user base. At present, Friend.tech adopts an invitation system. Users need to obtain a referral code and deposit at least 0.01 ETH to complete the registration. This strategy undoubtedly limits the participation of ordinary users and gives people a feeling of forced buying and selling.
At the same time, the “key” used by the platform further increases the risk of user participation due to its extreme volatility and speculative nature. As Yazan, a KOL in the crypto field, pointed out, “paying 1 ETH to access a group chat is ‘ridiculous’” and the price could quickly drop to zero if the creator gets bored and leaves the app.
The sustainability of the platform has also been questioned. Initially, Friend.tech achieved rapid growth with a strategy centered on influencers, but as the initial excitement faded, users began to question its long-term viability: the platform’s over-reliance on influencers, once these key figures are no longer actively involved, the value of the platform may drop rapidly.
In response to this, Friend.tech made a strategic adjustment in the V2 update, shifting from an influencer-based model to one that focuses more on a broad community. However, there are still questions about the engagement of influencers and the actual value they bring when they are not active on the platform.
Currently, some crypto communities have also spread rumors that "Friend.tech can't beat Farcaster" and "Racer is going to run away again."
But Racer never seems to care about all kinds of controversies. As a serial WEB3 entrepreneur, he seems to have a deep understanding of the survival principles. Any new concept output will become a new hot spot, and hot spots will have hot money. For this reason, Friend.tech won Paradigm's seed round of financing with its "new gameplay".
In addition, according to the principle of "charging a 5% agreement fee for each transaction and an additional 5% fee from the stock issuer", Friend.tech has collected about $13.35 million in transaction fees so far, and the Friend.tech team has earned about $6.625 million.
According to the relevant page of Friend.tech, Racer is still active on Friend.tech. Currently, his personal comments can only be viewed by purchasing his personal key from 0.94 ETH. Racer may also delete his X account and posts in order to further hype his personal key.
This time, Racer posted a post to break up with Base, hinting that he would migrate out of Base, which is in line with his style of "shooting one shot and changing another shot", but Racer did not disclose further migration plans and deleted the post and X account. So, is this post a new hype to create heat or is it looking for a new way out for Friend.tech?
But as far as the market value of the native token Friend is concerned, users do not seem to buy it this time, and the current price of the currency is still around $1.17.
Friend.Tech has seen over $1M TVL loss in less than 24 hours. And plans to leave the Base network for its own chain, followed by news of a reversal, further destabilised the FRIEND token, hitting a new all-time low. Is it time to say goodbye to Friend.Tech?
KikyoThe token is currently trading at around $1.66 with a market cap of just over $155 million. On Crypto Twitter, the debate rages on as to whether FRIEND is still undervalued, with both sides engaged in heated debate.
JinseFinanceFriend.tech has once again led the market with its V2 version. Can it escape the SocialFi Ponzi trap this time?
JinseFinanceOverall, the V2 update provides a better user experience and a comprehensive environment.
JinseFinanceFriend.Tech, launched in 2023, uses "keys" for monetizing social interactions, attracting significant initial interest but facing challenges in sustaining engagement and revenue ahead of its version 2 launch.
MiyukiThis article studies four different social protocols and platforms: Farcaster, Lens, Friend.tech and Focus, focusing on how they build new web3 social experiences
JinseFinanceFriend.tech TVL dropped to US$33.98 million, a 19.5% decrease from US$42.25 million on November 18, within the last two days.
OliveAn elaborate online scam impersonated a reporter from a well-known media outlet to conduct a fraudulent interview, tricking the victim into clicking on deceptive links that stole sensitive data and compromised his account.
JoyDespite its meteoric rise since its launch, Friend.Tech has sparked a chorus of commendation within the crypto realm but also some voices resonate with a foresight that probes the possibility of burnout.
CatherineFriend.Tech, a decentralised social media platform, is a creation that melds technological prowess with human interaction, and orbits around the idea of crypto personalities — in short, the transformative utilisation of "shares" as digital assets.
Catherine