Tech
friend.tech surpasses 100,000 users as crypto community debates its longevity
The question that arises with every new cryptocurrency craze is: will it last?
The latest hot app is friend.techwhich creates tradable tokens corresponding to user profiles on social media platform X. Owning someone’s token grants access to a private chat room with them.
The project has surpassed 100,000 users in less than two weeks since its launch, according to a popular Dune control Panel.
amico.tech activity
DeFi Dave, a well-known educator in the cryptocurrency industry, believes that friends.tech can demonstrate true durability. “It’s not the symbolic part,” he told The Defiant. “What makes it sticky is that people are so active in the chat.”
SocialFi
friends.tech stands out from other recent cryptocurrency trends, such as liquid staking tokens (LST) and real-world resources (RWA) as it is as much social as it is financial. Probably, memecoinanother major trend of 2023, are primarily a social phenomenon, but no app or subsector has successfully focused on individuals to the extent that friends.tech has.
This isn’t the first attempt to tokenize social media: Token-based communication experiments have been in the zeitgeist for years. Balaji Srinivasan, former CTO of Coinbase, started an app called Earn.com in 2018, which allowed users to send “cold emails” to influential VCs and CEOs, who could respond for a fee. Coinbase acquired Earn.com in 2018 before phasing it out in late 2019.
Other experiments like Bitclout they awarded tokens to individuals but struggled to gain traction.
Airdrop speculation
friends.tech generated some of its buzz thanks to a weekly airdrop campaign launched on August 18. OKHotShotwell-known on-chain analyst, believes that interest in the application could fade once the airdrop is completed.
“Most of the time you raise the pump and then you just go down from there,” he told The Defiant.
DeFi Dave thinks friends.tech users might stick around for more than just token allocations. “If the people on your platform are exclusively airdrop farmers, then you’ve got it wrong,” he said, adding that friends.tech’s core offering was chat, not the financial aspects that drove developers to create tools to exchange i social tokens.
“The apps built around friends.tech are built for traders by traders, but friends.tech itself is not an app for traders,” he said.
friend.tech may be trying to downplay its financial side. On August 21st, the project renamed shares – the tokens representing profiles – as keys.