A new social media platform has taken the blockchain world by storm over the past few weeks. Users have paid over $1.6 million USD in fees within 24 hours to use the application and speculate on personalities. But what exactly is Friend.Tech, and is the hype justified?
Friend.tech is a mobile social media platform that enables users to trade "shares" of other users. The application offers each user a chatroom. To read a user's messages, one must acquire shares of that particular person. After selling the shares, the chatroom becomes invisible. For influencers, Friend.tech enables the offering of exclusive interactions to their followers.
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Strong beginnings for Friend.tech
The initial success of the platform didn't take long to materialize. Within the first two days of the public beta launch, over 10,000 users had already signed up on Friend.tech. The application links users with their X-profile (formerly Twitter) and generates a new blockchain address for trading shares. The recently launched Base network of the Coinbase crypto exchange serves as the foundation. A steep fee of 10% is charged on every trade, half of which goes to the development team and the other half to the wallet of the respective personality. The price of individual shares follows an algorithm similar to decentralized exchanges, adjusting the value along a mathematical curve.
Crypto-specific personalities with existing followings on X quickly joined Friend.tech. High trading volumes for their own shares also translate to good compensation, thereby creating incentives for fan interaction. On the flip side, shareholders can benefit from the virality of a specific influencer and speculate on it. This dynamic has already generated $155,000 USD for the platform's top profile, the crypto personality Cobie, as indicated by data from the analysis platform Dune.
App goes viral thanks to revenue sharing
A week later, these figures attracted celebrities from outside the crypto space. Esports player Richard “FaZe Banks” Bengtson and NBA player Grayson Allen were present on Friend.tech just 10 days after the platform's launch. Soon, other personalities followed suit, including family-friendly content creators who had previously offered exclusive content to their followers through subscription models. Up to this point, users had paid over $6.6 million USD in Friend.tech fees, with half of that amount distributed to profile owners. With nearly 2 million transactions since its launch two weeks ago, Friend.tech currently ranks among the most popular blockchain apps.
Critics gighlight drawbacks of Friend.tech
While Friend.tech largely gained traction within the crypto community, skeptics also pointed out some downsides of the platform. One of the most prominent criticisms is the somewhat questionable legal status of the app. Although the shares of individual profiles are no longer called "Shares" but "Keys," the connection to traditional securities is still evident. Observers on social media also criticized the 10% fee for each transaction as unsustainable. In effect, users pay 20% for trading shares - a fee for both buying and selling.
Whether it's Friend.tech or another platform like Lens that achieves the breakthrough for decentralized social media, the field is likely to be interesting to follow. In today's world, the tech giants behind successful social media platforms have complete control over user-generated content, data, and ultimately the revenues generated through them. The application of blockchain technology could disrupt these monopolistic constructs and transfer ownership of profiles to content creators and consumers. Because that's exactly what defines the era of Web 3.0.
