friend.tech has been generating significant attention through a series of Twitter threads and mentions. Individuals unfamiliar with this realm are curious about its origin and nature. To shed light on these questions, this explanation will delve into what Friend Tech is and whether it could be worthwhile for you to consider giving it a try, even if just once.
Friend.tech is basically a decentralized social media app that allows users to tokenize their friends. So this basically means that you can buy and sell shares of your friends’ social media profiles. And the pricing of the shares depends on various factors, but the main ones are the influence of the social media account and the impact it does.
For example, if I am an influencer or even have a good number of friends who degen into random stuff, I make a profile on friend.tech and then sell my shares to them and now they are shareholders of my profile on that website. Interesting? It is. You gain or lose value based on what you do or say, and how people project you’d do. Sometimes, speculation could lead to profiles seeing their shares go to thousands of dollars each.
UPDATE: August 22nd, 2023: There have been more details coming out about the team that is behind the friend.tech app and how they abandoned the previous projects, and apart from that, there are some issues that I raised below and they add to the list of red flags. It makes the app even less likable.
https://twitter.com/SolanaMummy/status/1693953324586848569
Since it is on the Base Network, which is new and has so many eyes on it, the dApp is endorsed by many influencers and also by the Base Network itself. And when there’s the word “Airdrop” involved, you see people trying out stuff speculating about a hefty sum of money coming to their wallet later on.
https://twitter.com/BuildOnBase/status/1691941354405020110
Every Friday, an Airdrop of points is done to the users on the app, the criteria of which is not clear yet, but the friend.tech team says that a total of 100 million points will be airdropped during the course of six months, which is the beta period of the app. The points are recorded off-chain but the speculation as usual is that these might convert to the airdrop of tokens later on. Again, for now, that is pure speculation and majorly because it is a count of 100 million which usually is what we see around when we talk tokens.
We just did our first Friday Points Airdrop to 44k users.
Some reminders:
– 100M points will be distributed during the six month beta period
– Airdrops happen on Fridays
– Points are recorded off-chain
– Points will have a special purpose once the beta period ends— friend.tech (@friendtech) August 18, 2023
Using the app is pretty easy. At least on Apple iPhone where I tried, there is no app itself and you would have to add the website to the home screen, and bridging now is easy with you just proceeding with the steps and seeing the deposits in your wallet in a few minutes after you send the ETH from your other wallet. Even while signing up, you can use either your phone number, your Google account, or your Apple account.
A token-gated community where you enter the chats of some of the biggest influencers and known personalities in the Crypto space only by buying a share, that’s easy access for everyone. But while that’s a major plus and there could be multiple other reasons why you should be using friend.tech, but I have used the app already and would not really ask my friends or followers to go buy my shares right now. Why? Read on!
The app is buggy. There’s a whole lot of scope for improvement, and the current interface doesn’t even feel like something one would want to use. It’s so basic and sending messages keeps failing at times.
friend.tech is heavily botted. You open your account only by linking your Twitter and the bots probably are set in a way that if the profile had a good few thousand followers, they run the first second to buy shares of the new account for the cheapest price, and once you invite your friends and followers who end up buying the shares later, they become the exit liquidity for those bots. Imagine them doing this for thousands of profiles each day, the bots and CT are the only ones making money, while the ones who buy those shares have only this utility – “talk to the person directly in a chat”.
For such a largely shared and actively driven app, they don’t even have a readily-available Privacy Policy page for people to read and understand what info or rights they are giving up while signing up and making an account here, or connecting their X (Twitter) account with friend.tech.
I am sure these founders and CT members who are building up profiles there are and seeing the share prices go up for now would slowly fade away stating the incompetence of the app as a reason, for lack of activity or interest from the users.
Also, the idea of getting that exclusive chat access is good until you realize how late you are and the price of the share. Faze Banks with about 123 holders has a share price of over 2 ETH each, and the same is the case with Cobie and Hsaka. Rookie had just a bit less than 100 holders and the share price was close to 2 ETH. Why would you want to spend that much when in the end, it’s for opening the gate for the chat with that particular CT member or celebrity?
Okay, while I am being extremely critical about things here, I can also say that these thoughts are probably because it is still super early and we might see heavy improvements going forward, but that’s still a “probable” scenario, but given how the news is floating around about details of 100k+ account with their Twitter and ETH address being leaked already, it shows the unpreparedness of the app and also how weak the security of it is. It’s really odd that a dApp of this caliber that is shilled by some of the biggest CTs from the space is not prepared well enough. I mean, yeah it is arguable that the data is pretty much public if a person wants to search for the right info as it is the name, Twitter handle, and the ETH address, but in the end, if that data got leaked from the database, it still is a question about the security of the app itself.
The concept is fun. You would love to have your own chat section with your stakeholders to get a chance to directly interact with you, and feel important as well if you are one of the known guys in the space, but otherwise, the points above are the reason why I am not yet bullish on the app itself. As said, the concept is great, but the implementation is not so great.
I made my profile to see what is up and ended up being botted, which is not an experience anyone new would want to have. I just hope things get fixed with such a good concept in hand, and we could see this playing out well and not just remain as an elite token-gated social community for CT influencers and profiles. ONLY IF the team stays and doesn’t abandon things later on and this doesn’t end up like any other app on a new network that came in for the activity and hype for the possible airdrop scenario.
Furthermore, I’d advise you to try this app only if you want to understand and see what things are, or as I said above, I wouldn’t even endorse my own profile there because when things are shilled by CT influencers and celebs, you end up being the exit liquidity for them.
