friend.tech, which was hot three months ago, now seems to have reached the end of the game and is facing a critical moment.
On August 10, 2023, friend.tech was officially launched. On October 2, friend.tech TVL exceeded US$50 million. On November 19, its TVL fell to US$33.98 million, compared with 42.25 million US dollars on November 18. The U.S. dollar has fallen 19.5% in the past two days. After nearly three months of frenzy in the crypto community, the mood is turning cold.
Although the friend.tech team maintains a stable update frequency, founders withdrawals, a large number of robot accounts rushing to make profits, and frequent changes in points rules have made the community user experience unsatisfactory. Recently, a large number of real user accounts have been misjudged as robots. , the data performance of friend.tech reflects that the platform is going through a crisis moment.
A large number of user accounts were mistakenly identified as robots, friend.tech faced a wave of withdrawals?
On November 17, friend.tech launched the friend.tech feed, which allows users to control the ranking of posts through voting. Users with higher Key prices will be allocated more votes.
BlockBeats observed that there are currently a large number of friend.tech real accounts that have been misjudged as robot accounts, resulting in these accounts not being allocated points this week. According to some user reports, if a Twitter account uses a registered default username or a combination of letters and numbers, this type of account will be judged as a robot by friend.tech.
friend.tech stated on social platforms on November 18 that it had identified and removed 600,000 accounts identified as robots from the feed’s voting distribution, and stated that if a user account is mistakenly identified as a robot, it can Contact friend.tech customer service and provide your Twitter username.
The user requested to unlock his account on @friend.tech on X
In terms of data, this past weekend, the total transaction volume of friend.tech exceeded 10 million US dollars, a new high in more than half a month, but this may be an exit behavior. From November 18th to 19th, friend.tech withdrew a total of 4,420 ETH, and its TVL fell by about 21%, the lowest level in the past two months.
On November 20, a large number of users were still selling keys and fleeing friend.tech; Picture source community
The behavior of determining that real users are robots has caused a lot of negative comments about friend.tech from the community. Crypto researcher @Loki_Zeng posted that all strategies of friend.tech are transaction and creation fee-oriented, which is not very user-friendly. “Let’s not talk about how many real accounts have been accidentally damaged. If you think some user behaviors should not be awarded points, then should the 5% handling fee be refunded?
And why did you ignore it when the Bot was making a lot of MEV income? A Bot that harms users but can generate income for you is not a Bot? The points rule has been changed 800 times. Once it is changed, many people will need to reconfigure it once, and the project side can earn a handling fee. Is this really encouraging Holder?
In addition, this wave of selling has also brought about a crisis of trust among the user groups who hold keys. Christian, co-founder of crypto fund NDV and NFT whale, said on his social account that the holders behavior of selling keys without the homeowners knowledge is not friendly. Community user @defi_goddess also said that before opting out, you should send a private message to tell people who have recently used the 3, 3 strategy so that they can be sold first, saying this is basic morality and common sense.
After the sentiment in the community fermented, racer, the founder of friend.tech, posted a Chinese message on the platform, Family members, who understands? Some platform users said that this made the friend.tech team very unprofessional.
On FT, the friendship boat capsizes very quickly
When friend.tech was first launched, there were many articles analyzing its economic model in the crypto field. In addition, the friend.tech team has been updating product features, and users expectations for airdrops and FOMO are getting higher and higher. But as the market has calmed down recently, it seems like it’s time to look back at the other side of friend.tech that was once ignored by the public.
The 3, 3 mentioned earlier is a classic Ponzi game strategy. In friend.tech, the goal of the 3, 3 strategy is to climb the rankings and send a signal to other accounts that you are a holder. Those who do not sell their keys will achieve a win-win effect.
Suppose your Key is worth 0.1 ETH and you have a friend who is also worth 0.1 ETH. If you buy each others Key, both of you will receive a 5% fee, and based on the bonding curve, your value will increase from 0.10 ETH to 0.12 ETH, effectively increasing your value by approximately 0.02 ETH. You can then repeat the same operation with another friend to increase your value again. Repeat this action 100 times and your key will become very valuable.
As a result, the proportion of Social in friend.techs SocialFi tag has become smaller and smaller. The attributes of Fi have allowed a group of traders and profit-making robots to win higher-value profits.
friend.tech itself is not a platform that strongly binds content production and social relationships. It is just a financial product derived from Twitter, not a social product. This is also the key to friend.techs huge profits. The friend.tech agreement does not require KOL to produce content, and users who come to buy keys are not here to consume content. KOL itself does not seem to be responsible for users’ keys. The seemingly weak social relationship is actually blocked by friend.tech’s financial Properties are completely masked.
Christian once mentioned his friend.tech trading strategy when he participated in the Wang Feng Ten Questions Live/Web Threesome column. When building a portfolio, he will choose more stable users. The judgment criteria are good character, structure, and strength. , The secret is to choose well-organized friends when making friends, and do it well yourself. Dont give up your reputation and accumulated things just because of a small immediate profit. I have said from the beginning that I will not throw away my keys in advance. , I will definitely leave time for everyone to sell first when I leave last.”
friend.tech user Christian expressed his attitude; Source:@Christianeth
But judging from the current ecological landscape of friend.tech, this friendship boat capsized very quickly. More importantly, friend.tech shows that 3, 3 is the ending of a classic Ponzi game. The prisoner trapped in a desperate situation must be the fastest one.
Success is also 3, 3, failure is also 3, 3. The number of users and prices of friend.tech skyrocketed wildly in the early stage, thanks to its excellent economic model. However, in the later period, it could not continue to survive. In addition to such an economic model, what other solutions can there be for Web3 social networking, and where will it go? This is a question for all relevant practitioners.
