Why is friend.tech so popular?

I wanted to write a post about friend.tech and why I thought it would continue to grow and be one of the first iterations of Web3 social. I hadn’t paid enough attention to the growth of TG Bots, so I promised myself that I would be more proactive when new potential Metas appeared.

1. Viewpoints of this article

Friend.tech combined three essential elements to go viral:

Utility — This is great for the crypto niche market, as it gives people access to celebrity accounts that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to interact with.

The basics - the blockchain part works well, running on the Base chain, with daily transaction volume of around 10,000.

Speculation — This one is critical as it acts as a flywheel for adoption; people are betting on a creator boom (similar to the NFT craze) and are actively accumulating airdropped PTS.

This is smart because it gives degens what they want most - alpha and access to celebrities/KOLs; Want to ask Hsaka for advice? Buy a stock and you can ask a question on his channel. After the initial excitement, friend.tech activity has calmed down, but it still maintains a consistent daily activity.

Some people only used friend.tech for the first few days of releases and then abandoned it, but you can see that accounts that actively released alpha and interacted with shareholders saw the stock price rise to historical peaks even after the initial enthusiasm subsided.

This isn’t a new idea, but I think it stands out as a new meta. Bitclout is a little too honest and lacks interactive elements, while Lens is trying to keep up (why use Lens when you can use Twitter/X?)

Ironically, its glitches and (currently) lack of features have led people to dismiss it as a whim — which could be an opportunity for those who bet on the project early. (Or it could help them get a free bag, as we’ll soon find out.)

2. Advantages

Running on Base — It is the L2 with the highest potential for retail inflows due to Base; transactions can pass through smoothly and seamlessly.

Easy to operate on mobile applications (standardized and friendly) — no hardware wallets, metamask/rabby wallets, etc. required.

Creator stock is rising and they are incentivized to drive volume (they profit from buying and selling stock).

Airdrop rewards keep everyone on the app active and they all want to get more points.

New Meta — This looks more appealing than Bitclout or Lens.

Base itself has a larger daily trading volume than Arbitrum or Optimism, and friend.tech is a big reason for this.

3. Disadvantages

Interface glitches - Sometimes chat content would not load successfully.

Currently only supports SMS, lacks other features - no photos, etc. (imagine the need to share charts, load links normally, etc.).

The launch of the first points-based airdrop rewards now might lead one to believe that most activity so far has been people accumulating points.

Bear market, low interest rates, not many people using the app.

The bonding curve for stocks may introduce some psychological biases that discourage people from buying stocks.

The more holders there are, the more the next person who comes in will have to pay to get 1 share. But the number of holders will also increase and decrease with buying/selling. This is different from the case of NFTs, where you can place orders to buy NFTs at different levels, but the number of NFTs always remains the same. In contrast to the liquidity of NFT floor prices, the bonding curve of friend.tech is linear and can be flattened by equity dilution (hopefully in progress).

4. How I did it

First, buy 1 share of all the creators I want to visit on the mobile app. If you can’t buy some of them, you can buy them on Friend Index, which is a cool account created by 0ctoshi.etch that summarizes the popular posts of friend.tech celebrity accounts.

The second step is to bet on the initial “blue chips” — the big accounts that embrace the platform and are super active. Account @blknoiz06 has been super active and ranks third in market cap; account @0xRacerAlt is the founder of friend.tech, so betting on his stock can serve as a proxy for the entire app.

Then you can bet on the "smaller" accounts that are adding value to shareholders - either when they first join the platform or by betting on their future value growth. A few examples: @d_gilz, @Teeznutz11, @AvaxGems, @lBattleRhino are all active.

There are many other accounts that excel as well so you need to do your research. The prices of some of the stocks may look high but I think the market cap is small compared to their potential if the app becomes popular.

Top five accounts with market capitalization between $20,000 and $40,000:

5. Useful tools and resources

Use Crypto Koryo's Dune dashboard to monitor all relevant metrics.

I use two tools, one is realfriend.tech, which is probably the best UI for desktop friend.tech, however, you need to hold 1 share of iam4x to use it (0.4 ETH), and there is also a sniper robot FriendMEX, which is free software.

I really feel like friend.tech has a chance to become a new meta and take similar projects by storm; however, if you wait until metrics, UI/UX, and adoption are improved, the payback will be far less attractive than it is now. While still an MVP, it may look very different 6 months from now.