Friend.tech threatens to punish users if they use copycat apps

Friend.tech warned users who choose to jump ship to “forks and copies” will see their existing points forfeited.

Crypto’s newest decentralized social media (DeSo) app friend.tech has been met with intense criticism over a decision to punish users who opt in to forks or copycat versions of its tokenized social media platform.

“To make sure loyal users are rewarded fairly during our beta, users moving to forks and copies will automatically opt out of earning Points and forfeit existing points,” wrote the official friend.tech X account in an Aug. 28 tweet.

We expect @friendtech clones and other types of copies will emerge.

To make sure loyal users are rewarded fairly during our beta, users moving to forks and copies will automatically opt out of earning Points and forfeit existing points. They will be able to use the app normally pic.twitter.com/C1rTEQQr17
— friend.tech (@friendtech) August 28, 2023

While Friend.tech did not make mention to any specific competitors, and number of X users in the reply pointed to a new DeSo or “SocialFi” application called Shares which is scheduled to go live to public beta on Aug. 31.

Shares #roadmap for the following week.

We'll be sharing daily dev logs on Medium about updates. We started building the $SHARES platform's backend a couple of weeks ago, and started with our frontend this weekend - so far, it's been a huge progress! pic.twitter.com/oLEYMlhIcF
— shares.finance (@SharesFinance) August 21, 2023

Friend.tech has been airdropping “reward points” to its beta testers every week, which will total a distribution of 100 million points over 6 months.

The team has not yet shared what the points will be ultimately used for, only mentioning on Aug. 15 it “will have a special purpose when the app enters official release status.”

We just did our first Friday Points Airdrop to 44k users.

Some reminders:
- 100M points will be distributed during the six month beta period
- Airdrops happen on Fridays
- Points are recorded off-chain
- Points will have a special purpose once the beta period ends
— friend.tech (@friendtech) August 18, 2023

Some expect it to translate to tokens to friend.tech governance, while others believe it could have some financial significance for users. Others believe that due to the seed round investment from Paradigm, there will likely be a friend.tech native token airdrop in the future.

Friend.tech’s announcement did not go down well with members of the crypto community.

Within the first hour of the announcement being posted — it attracted hundreds of negative comments and reposts that derided the app for its anti-competitive move.

*Another reaction from an X user over the recent announcement. Source: X (Twitter)*

“Threatening / penalizing users for trialing other platforms is completely against everything this industry stands for,” wrote pseudonymous trader CryptoKaleo in response to the announcement.

“This is a prime example of how not to handle competition in Web3 lol — excited to read the apology in a few hours” said another.

The announcement comes less than three weeks after its public launch of Aug. 11. Meanwhile, Friend.tech has seen a drop in key metrics such as activity, inflows and volume over the past few days.

At the time of publication transactions on Friend.tech have declined more than 90% from its peak of nearly 525,000 transactions on Aug. 21, with less than 50,000 cumulative transactions on Aug. 28, according to data from Dune Analytics.

Magazine: Blockchain games aren’t really decentralized… but that’s about to change

Friend.tech hype unsustainable? Critics give it only months to live

Coin Telegraph

Most crypto industry heavyweights have been bullish about the new decentralized social media app friend.tech, but some critics warn it's getting too hot too quickly.

Friend.tech, a new decentralized social media (DeSo) app has rapidly become one of the hottest new things in crypto, with over 64,000 new users and more than 24,000 ETH in trading volume since its beta version launch of Aug. 11.

While many crypto industry heavyweights have praised the app for bringing thousands of people on-chain and inspiring sign-ups from even non-crypto figures — such as gaming YouTuber Faze Banks and Russian protest group Pussy Riot — some have warned it's at risk of burning out.

Built on Coinbase’s layer-2 network Base, friend.tech is a platform that allows users to purchase shares of their friends and influencers, which in turn grants them access to a private chat with that user.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, crypto commentator Yazan pointed out a number of troubling factors that led him to believe the app has between six and eight weeks before both share prices and general activity begin to nosedive.

Let me tell you one thing.

Something isn’t right about @friendtech.

Creators making money from a group chat that doesn’t even work when you can’t even reply directly to people?

The way pricing works is ridiculous and can be easily taken advantage of.

Pumps and dumps. pic.twitter.com/TJqcktEM6P
— Yazan (@YazanXBT) August 20, 2023

Yazan argued there has been an unsustainable rate at which share prices have increased.

“The fucked up market making that guarantees that the app makes the most money along with creators — the price goes up too fast,” he said.

“How come there’s 100 holders and the price is 1 ETH — 1 ETH to be able to see a private chat?”

According to pseudonymous software engineer Cygaar in an Aug. 20 X thread, the price of someone's shares on friend.tech is proportional to the square of the outstanding supply. As the supply increases, the price increases exponentially.

It looks daunting, so let's simplify it. Let's assume that you only want to buy/sell a single share (amount = 1). This is also known as the spot price.

Using our middle school algebra skills, we can expand out the function and we'll get:

price = supply^2 / 16000
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) August 19, 2023

Drawing parallels to BitClout — a predecessor DeSo app from 2021 — pseudonymous Web3 marketer Legendary shared his bearish prediction on the longevity of Friend.tech.

“Absolutely not. I think the platform will collapse as BitClout did. We are in a bear market, and there's nothing to do. Everyone jumps on an opportunity to make money, but I think the platform will be done within the next weeks to months,” he wrote.

The bull case for friend.tech

Others however, shared a far more positive outlook on the new decentralized social media platform, praising it for its novel developments in UX for crypto applications — something that crypto app developers have long struggled to get right.

David Phelps, cofounder of Jokerace and EcoDAO, described Friend.tech’s UX as the “greatest crypto has seen,” pointing to three main factors as to why the app was such a significant breakthrough for crypto.

Firstly, the app doesn’t require users to download via an app store account, which points more strongly to the idea of decentralization. Secondly, it bridges the funds to the app automatically, reducing the need for convoluted transactions.

Finally, the app allows users to deposit their ETH once and then buy and sell shares without ever having to sign a transaction again. The constant need to verify transactions via Metamask signatures has been a major criticism of many DApps in the crypto space.

Regardless of the varied predictions concerning the app's future success or failure, there’s no denying that it has taken crypto by storm.

On Aug. 19, Friendtech announced that it had received seed round funding from crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, sparking a wave of speculation over a future airdrop and potential token launch.

Earlier this year, we partnered with @paradigm to build tools for new online social interactions.

We're grateful for the community's warm reception and excited to continue growing with you all pic.twitter.com/yINDMXkpuZ
— friend.tech (@friendtech) August 18, 2023

According to data from DefiLlama, Friend.tech has generated $1.42 million in fees in the last 24 hours, and $4.2 million since its public launch.

*Total Friend.tech fees and revenue since launch. Source: DeFiLlama*

At the time of publication, the total revenue for the project stands at $1.88 million, and has witnessed over 724,000 transactions from more than 64,500 unique traders.

Magazine: Blockchain games aren’t really decentralized… but that’s about to change

friendtech airdrop