Decentralized social media app Friend.Tech is making headlines after it conducted a reported 100,000 transactions in volume in a single day – believing to have even eclipsed OpenSea.
What is Friend.Tech?
One of the hottest apps on Base, Friend.Tech, tokenizes crypto personalities by allowing users to buy and sell “shares” of people, which fluctuates according to supply and demand. Ownership of these “shares” then grants a user access to a private chat with that person
It served as one of the first players who ventured into decentralized social media, while seemingly gaining significant traction prior to it devolving, thanks to its @TweetDAO project – an NFT which granted access to posting from a shared Twitter account.
Its developer, who goes by the name @0xRacerAlt, was also the lead developer of @TweetDAO.
“The more trading and speculation on you, the more money you make,” tweeted Coinbase’s Senior Staff Software Engineer Yuga Cohler (@yuga.eth).
How to Sign Up
Currently, the social media app is in beta, invite-only through referral codes that Cohler has been generously sharing across X.
Cohler also shared that due to the app’s surging popularity, it barely works due to the “excessive traffic,” noting that the app’s data latency is greater than 10 seconds.
The app has been so popular in the day since its inception that it barely works, crumbling under excessive traffic.
Most of the screens do not load, most of the time. Data latency is often >10s.
And yet, the user growth is unstoppable. What accounts for this? pic.twitter.com/3TnIwuVUfC
— yuga.eth
(@yugacohler) August 11, 2023
“The more referrals, the more ‘points’ you get airdropped every Friday,” Cohler posted.
https://t.co/L11mNJZgY3 is currently in beta, so invite-only. The more referrals, the more “points” you get airdropped every Friday.
That “Airdrop” is a tab unto itself speaks to the dev team’s deep understanding of the crypto community.
CT loves aidrops. pic.twitter.com/o21rhjh7un
— yuga.eth
One user, who goes by the name of @functi0nZer0, put together a spreadsheet that outlines what he believes is the pricing model for Friend.Tech, but isn’t confirmed.
Will This Frenzy Last?
While Friend.Tech could be compared to previous attempts by apps like BitClout and DeSo Protocol, the community seems to think this execution is much different, due to the “tech choices” and “go-to-market strategy.”
As for whether this will last beyond the current hype stage, that remains to be seen. However, it does put an interesting (and bizarre) perspective on assessing an individual’s measured self-worth in the crypto space.
