Original author: defioasis
Original editor: Colin Wu
The content of this article is only for information sharing, and does not promote or endorse any business and investment behavior. Readers are requested to strictly abide by the laws and regulations of the region where they are located, and not to participate in any illegal financial behavior.
On August 10, the social application friend tech on the Base chain exploded in the community. Users rushed to seek invitation codes to join, and tens of thousands of users flooded into this nascent L2 network because of it. However, the good times didnt last long, the popularity lasted less than three days, and the activity of friend tech fell off a cliff. Just when it was thought that it would silently withdraw from the stage of history, friend tech returned with a high-profile return with the news of the seed round financing of the encryption head venture capital Paradigm, coupled with the distribution of points for the first time, the users who had already quit quickly returned and set off a trend on social media again , attracting more new users to enter.
According to the CryptoKoryo data panel, as of 20:30 on August 19th, in about 10 days since its birth, the transaction volume of friend tech has exceeded 11,000 ETH, the number of independent users has exceeded 39,000, and more than 518,000 transactions have been completed. The Paradigm effect is also powerful enough. After the announcement of the financing news, friend tech’s active users grew rapidly, with more than 1.7k buyers in a single hour, setting a record high.
Data source: https://dune.com/cryptokoryo/friendtech
background
According to Coinbase senior software engineer yuga.eth, friend tech was built by TweetDAO and Stealcam lead developer Racer (@0x RacerAlt). The claim was also reported by CoinDesk.
Both TweetDAO and Stealcam are explorations of decentralized social networking, and there are similarities in design, so they can also be regarded as the predecessor applications of friend tech.
TweetDAO was born around April 2022. The basic principle is that DAO creators sell Eggs NFT, which allows holders to post one tweet per day from DAOs Twitter account without limiting any text content. As more NFTs are sold, the floor price of NFTs will also rise. At present, the official account of TweetDAO has been cancelled, and there is very little information on the website.
After TweetDAO, Racer found another developer, shrimp (@shrimppepe, also co-founder of friend tech), to co-build Stealcam in March of this year. Stealcam is a photo social application based on Arbitrum. The basic principle is that users can take pictures and upload pictures to become NFT, but the pictures of NFT are hidden and need to be stolen first and then revealed; other users need to pay a certain fee (steal) to get The right to reveal (reveal), and the right to reveal can only be enjoyed by the latest paying user, which means that the right to reveal is time-sensitive, and there is a possibility that the reveal cannot be revealed after paying the fee, because in this process, Being paid again by someone else. The number of times to pay for the same NFT is unlimited. As the number of steals increases, the NFT floor price will become more expensive, and the price difference will be distributed among creators, users, and agreements. Currently the official Stealcam account has been canceled, but the website is still being used.
It is not difficult to see that the social products built by Racer all have strong financial attributes, and all have a structure promoted by Ponzi. In addition, Stealcam won the praise of Base core developer Jesse Pollak after its launch, which may also pave the way for friend tech to choose Base.
Introduction
friend tech is very simple to obtain the application. IOS users open the official website on their mobile phones and add it to the home screen without relying on any third-party downloads. Users need to obtain an invitation code, bind Twitter, and inject at least 0.01 ETH into the Base network to enter the application. The function of friend tech is essentially the same as WeChat group and Telegram group, but the core of friend tech is to enter and exit the group chat organically. Users can choose to join a group by themselves and obtain group shares by paying the reserve price; if they want to withdraw from the group, they can sell the group shares they own. As the number of people who choose to join a certain group gradually increases, the total number of group shares increases, and the reserve price of each groups shares will also increase. This means that joining a certain group not only has social needs, but also has the possibility of investment. Purely from an investment point of view, joining a certain group is an investment in the group and the group owner, so speculative users often choose to buy more shares in other groups or their own group that they think have potential in the early stage.
economic model
The economic model of friend tech mainly includes group share growth model, fee structure and point incentives.
The friend tech group shares grow from 0, and the only variable affecting the price per share is the number of outstanding shares.
Price in ETH = supply^ 2 / 16000, that is, price per share (ETH) = (total amount of shares ^ 2) / 16000
(Data source: https://1drv.ms/x/s!AkA_OhBaQXjAiEbRNPrKm-YQH7Yi?e=vVne4E)
As the total number of issued shares continues to grow, the net price difference between buying and selling shares will become larger and larger, but the price difference rate (spread/selling price) will become smaller and smaller. The reason for the price difference is not complicated. The growth of shares starts from 0, so there must be buying first and then selling, and the seller always lags behind the buyer. At the Nth share, the selling price is the buying price at the N-1st share, such as:
In the first share, the buying price is 0.0000625 ETH, and the selling price is 0 ETH. In the second share, the buying price is 0.00025 ETH, and the selling price is 0.0000625 ETH. The spread rate is -300%. The price is 0.0005625 ETH, the selling price is 0.00025 ETH, and the spread rate is -125%.
At the 4th share, the bid price is 0.001 ETH, and the ask price is 0.0005625 ETH, the spread rate is -77.78%.
And so on.
(Data source: https://1drv.ms/x/s!AkA_OhBaQXjAiEbRNPrKm-YQH7Yi?e=vVne4E)
friend tech charges a 10% fee on each transaction of group shares, 5% of which is distributed to holders of group shares, and the remaining 5% goes to the treasury revenue. As of 20:30 on August 19, within ten days, the friend tech treasury (0x dd...f 742) had recorded 579 ETH income, worth about $960,000.
Points incentive is an important means for friend tech to turn Twitter users into core users of the application. It uses potential token airdrop expectations and provides tangible points to motivate users. Friend Tech will distribute a total of 100 million points during the next 6-month test period, once every Friday, and the points record will not be uploaded to the chain. On August 19, friedn tech completed its first points airdrop. Although the specific rules for points are not yet clear, trading volume should be the most important indicator. In addition, the community speculates that points are related to airdrops, because Blur, another successful investment project of Paradigm, is a master of points games.
Future and challenges
At the end of July, among the latest top ten areas of concern released by Paradigm, decentralized social networking was impressively listed. However, due to the high cost of social migration and the strong first-mover advantage of centralized social networking, there are few successful projects on this track. Whether it is Lenster or friend tech, it can be seen that the impact of financial attributes such as airdrops, incentives, and financing is far greater than the application itself as a social attribute.
However, the author believes that the private domain group chat scene represented by friend tech has certain objective conditions for success. A good example is the Alpha community represented by the LaserCat community. Purchasing group shares with ETH is quite similar to purchasing NFT Pass cards with ETH. From the perspective of the path, the orientation is to join a certain community; the difference is that frend tech combines the two actions of purchasing and joining group chat into one, while the NFT form is two irrelevant actions. The purchase is through OpenSea, Blur and other NFT Marketplaces, and group chats mainly rely on Discord or others. Theoretically, friend techs shares can also be in the form of NFT. The needs of the NFT Alpha community are real. The direction of friend tech’s development is not to attract scattered users, but to attract users with long-term bonds. Therefore, from this perspective, friend tech’s ability to attract Discord community users may be more qualitative than direct Acquiring customers from Twitter is high. Of course, compared to Discords complete functions and powerful plug-in system, what friend tech can do is still too simple. If a group faces multiple complex problems, it may lead to low efficiency in daily communication. In the next step, friend tech needs to improve the functions for the user experience of the group.
Another advantage and disadvantage is that friend tech has greater restrictions on the expansion of the group size than NFTs with a total upper limit. Make a comparison of the total amount of LaserCat NFT (520) and the floor price (3.66 ETH) of a friend tech. When the LaserCat group in friend tech owns 520 shares, the buying price of the LaserCat group will be 16.9 ETH; when the LaserCat buying price is 3.66 ETH Yes, the LaserCat group has 242 shares and a maximum of 242 people. On the bright side, this also leads to a point worth thinking about. If PFP NFT or NFT Pass is a friend tech share, the cultural attributes of the group can be passed to non-holders through NFT, and then through the established algorithm, if The community you join really has corresponding value, which provides a basic floor price for NFT, which may drive price discovery of NFT.
refer to:
https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/08/11/is-friendtech-a-friend-or-foe-a-dive-into-the-new-social-app-driving-millions-in-trading-volume/
https://www.panewslab.com/zh/articledetails/5upll7es.html
https://www.asxn.xyz/p/friendtech
