“The marketplace for your friends” is turning crypto personalities into their own coins.
The mobile-only decentralized app has done $13 million in volume in just 5 days of its existence, with over 310,000 transactions and 24,000 buyer addresses.
Its first mysterious airdrop takes place on Friday, August 18.
Here are all the details you need to know about friend.tech, the strange new platform.
BUILT ON BASE
Friend Tech is a decentralized app built on Base, Coinbase’s new Ethereum Layer 2 network.
A Layer 2 network operates on top of an underlying blockchain protocol, and it processes transactions off of the Ethereum mainnet much faster and cheaper than using mainnet alone.
To use the app, one needs to bridge some Ethereum over to Base using a wallet like Metamask. Use that link for the official bridge, or use the new Friend Tech deposit feature.
But don’t bridge too much money. Using the official bridge is hard to do in reverse; transactions from Base back to ETH take 7 whole days.
visit the friend tech bridge from any device to load up
BUY AND SELL FRIEND SHARES
The main way Friend Tech works? Buy and sell shares of your friends.
During signup, you must connect your Twitter (X) account. Then, after you’ve deposited some Ethereum on Base, browse friends and check out the leaderboards.
The price of shares fluctuates based on supply & demand. Someone even backed into the pricing model for the platform, if you want a deep dive.
Some of the top people on the leaderboard are recognizable influencers in the crypto space (like Cobie), but some seem pretty random to me.
Users speculate on the market to try to flip shares as they climb up. It’s basically just as risky as speculating on a memecoin, but instead that memecoin is attached to a person. 😵💫 And is it considered a security? I mean… that’s a topic for another day.
Friend Tech charges a 10% fee on all volumes, with 5% going to the share owner and 5% going to its Friend treasury.
ENTER THE CHAT
Holding a friend share enables direct access to that shareowner via text chat.
It’s shown to the shareholder as a one-on-one chat, but it’s actually the share owner messaging tons of people at once.
In order to make buying their shares more attractive, users are offering utility for their friend tokens. Some of these include “alpha,” portfolio advice, share buybacks, and more.
This type of direct communication with the share owner is somewhat akin to something like Cameo, OnlyFans, or Patreon, where fans subscribe for more access to the creator.
Although I don’t think there are images available in chat yet… for now.
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ABOUT THE FOUNDER
The founder of Friend Tech is 0xRacerAlt, who has founded a few projects in the past. One of them was TweetDAO, and another was Stealcam. Both were focused on NFTs and decentralized media.
In May, Stealcam pivoted to become Friend Tech. Instead of launching on Arbitrum as it originally planned, it launched on Base a few months later.
The question is: will Friend Tech stick around?
PRIVACY POLICY: COMING SOON! IT’S FINE WE SWEAR!
There are definitely concerns about Friend Tech’s data privacy. When signing up on the app, there is no policy to be found.
On the desktop website, when clicked, it simply says: Coming soon! 😁♥️
…ok girl sure
Yikes. If you choose to sign up, it’s probably a good idea to be as anonymous as possible. Try using a new email address and a newly funded wallet.
Are you using Friend Tech?
Curiosity has gotten the best of most of my friends in NFTs, and they’re mostly all on it, awaiting airdrop points that have “future uses” on the app. 100,000,000 points will be distributed over six months.
If you want to sign up, grab an invite code from a friend, as it is currently invite-only.
But there’s something about being able to see your friends sell shares of you live on a timeline… it’s getting dark out there y’all.
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