FriendTech — over $4m in fees and $81m total inflow in just a few weeks?
SocialFI and trading your friends’ perceived values
SocialFi is one of those buzzword narratives that has been on everyone’s mind recently and one of the primary reasons has been FriendTech.
But before we dive deeper into FriendTech, let’s talk a bit about SocialFi.
What is SocialFi?
Well, it's a new concept that bridges the gap between Web2 social media networks and Defi. It's a way to provide a decentralized environment for social users to earn through engagement.
Essentially it's a way to give back to the creators and let them have more control over their data. Plus there are no limitations to the different ways that creators can monetize.
FriendTech was created to help give back control to creators while also bringing in that SocialFi bit that we all dreamed of in our most dystopian dreams: being able to trade our friends’ perceived values.
In just a few weeks, FriendTech has brought in over 4 mil in fees with over 81 mil in total inflow.
That’s a lot of money flowing into the protocol over a short span. Most of this is due to the way the “keys” work. They use a bonding curve to start the price low and it increases rather quickly each time a key is bought.
So if you were early to some of your favourite influencers, odds are you racked up some good profit. Now if you were said influencer, you made a decent amount as well as you earned roughly 5% of every buy and sell made of your keys.
This is the good of FriendTech; it offers a way for content creators to earn and gain 1 on 1 interaction with keyholders. It also brought an insane amount of hype and not just to crypto natives!
Celebrities like Nadeshot and Faze Banks joined and brought in a massive inflow of people. Some basketball players and even OnlyFans girls started populating the platform.
While that seems like a top, it's not a bad thing because it brought more outside eyes to a crypto platform. If we want crypto to make a name for itself, apps need to be built with the average (non-crypto native) user in mind and FriendTech has started that!
Here’s the bad though: It’s had a quick burn. Even now, FriendTech is starting to falter with key prices starting to plummet. People figured out that at a certain point, you have to want to hold your key and interact with the person without expectation of profit. Obviously, traders weren’t a big fan of this and started to dump keys.
On top of that, people questioned the efficacy of the platform and called it an influencer pump and dump to gain some quick cash.
People also were upset at the visible lack of a privacy policy and the UX isn’t very intuitive. Chats are one-sided for the user as the Influencer could see all chats, but keyholders could only see their question and the Influencers' responses which led to a lot of confusion.
The app itself was also very buggy and sometimes took hours for chats to load properly.
As a whole, FriendTech offers a unique insight into what SocialFi could become and maybe, it’ll be the catalyst that kicks it all off. They have people’s attention and a lot of Twitter (X) personalities still believe in the app’s future to gain more mindshare and keep it.
After all, the app is still fairly new and while it's burned bright and faded, it still has the potential to do more and be more with the capital they’ve amassed.
