Decentralized social community Friend.tech, which captured consideration with its buzzworthy launch earlier this month, is now going through intense scrutiny as key metrics expertise a fast decline, enjoying into earlier considerations in regards to the platform’s viability and intention.
Critics throughout social media have begun to declare the platform “dead” following a major drop in exercise, inflows, and quantity – inside simply three weeks of its launch. To not point out different justified considerations all through its early lifecycle.
What’s Friend.tech?
Friend.tech made a splash with its beta model debut on Coinbase’s layer-2 Base platform on August 11, which takes the extent (and ego) of right this moment’s influencers to the following degree by permitting them to promote “keys” which are linked on to their “X” (previously TwitteR) accounts that enable followers/supporters to message them privately. The platform reportedly takes a 5% minimize from these transactions.
Its attract prolonged to each cryptocurrency and non-crypto influencers, drawing personalities equivalent to Cobie from the UpOnly podcast, Faze Banks from YouTube, and the Russian protest group Pussy Riot.
The drop in inflows additionally factors to a major shift, with Friend.tech witnessing a decline from its excessive of $16.8 million on August 21 to round $1.6 million on August 27, marking a considerable lower of practically 90.5 %, based on CoinTelegraph.
This “promising platform” is available in wake of X CEO Elon Musk’s resolution to limit anybody who isn’t subscribed to Twitter Blue from messaging anybody that’s — the irony right here after all being that Musk’s earlier beliefs that the platform’s “corrupt” blue-badge verification packages have been alienating individuals merely took one other disguised kind fueled purely by greed and politicized advert income. And don’t neglect X’s new creator “cash-out” program that’s solely based mostly on impressions, quite than high quality management.
Friend.tech launched on Coinbase’s layer-2 Base blockchain and rapidly gained traction with social media influencers and others with huge followings. Throughout this “honeymoon” launch interval, the platform’s charges soared to over $1 million on August 19 inside a 24-hour span, surpassing notable platforms like Uniswap and the Bitcoin community.
In earlier nft now protection, we highlighted the varied opinions and commentary as as to whether this new platform was a “paradigm shift” or just one other fad that comes and goes to the detriment of traders – all fueled by synthetic hype and ill-equipped organizational construction.
Alex Valaitis, a controversial persona on this new crypto panorama, referred to Friend.tech as a “high stakes game of musical chairs” – indicating his perception that the one ones who make it out with any achieve are “the first one’s in…and first one’s out.”
Certainly, the platform’s fortunes have now taken a pointy flip. The charges, which as soon as reached a peak of $1.7 million on August 21, have now plummeted by over 87% to round $215,000 as of August 26, based on knowledge from DefiLlama.
In a candid publish on “X” (previously Twitter) on August 27, Coinbase’s funds danger supervisor Lisandro Rodriguez expressed his perception that the platform is now “dead” resulting from “greed and poor execution.”
The decline in charges has been mirrored by a pointy lower in patrons and sellers, with August 27 recording round 10,000 patrons and seven,800 sellers in comparison with the height of over 58,000 patrons and 27,000 sellers on August 21, as reported by Dune knowledge.
Concurrently, the variety of transactions on Friend.tech has seen a staggering decline of over 90% from its peak of practically 525,000 on August 21, plummeting to only over 51,000 on August 27, based on knowledge curated by Crypto Koryo.
One of many greatest considerations surrounding Friend.tech was the dearth of a privateness coverage, along with potential regulatory points because it involved the general public launch of person knowledge involving 100,000 person accounts that many believed to be a leak – regardless of what Friend.tech known as “public data.”
As Friend.tech faces these challenges, parallels have been drawn to the 2021 DeSo app BitCloud. Pseudonymous Web3 marketer Legendary expressed his perception that Friend.tech would possibly expertise the same destiny, stating that he thinks it “will collapse as BitClout did.”
May this be yet one more disguised instance of greed and fast earnings?
