Opinion: friend.tech is another beautiful Web3 social bubble

By Gabriel Bearlz Compiled by Luffy, Foresight News

friend.tech (FT) is not an interesting use case for SocialFi, but a Ponzi economy masquerading as a "social experiment", whose rapid growth is fueled by the irresponsible behavior of KOLs in a market full of scams.

The reasons are as follows:

1. The founder of the project has a dark history of launching a "financial experiment" and then giving up

The founder of friend.tech @0xRacerAlt is also the founder of TweetDAO and Stealcam, two projects that call themselves "social experiments".

TweetDAO was created in 2022, and its NFT holders can post content on the project's Twitter account (yes, that's all). But shortly after, the Twitter account was deactivated.

Launched in March, Stealcam proposes an auction mechanism where users can pay to view "secret photos" of certain accounts. Currently, the project twitter account is deactivated and the website usage is almost zero.

All three projects have the same characteristics:

• They promise a "social experiment".
• Has a pyramidal economic structure.
• lasted for a few months, then was discontinued.

2. Few use cases and no economic incentive for creators to stay on the platform

What makes me most skeptical about friend.tech's long-term viability is the very small intrinsic value of its use cases.

You are not buying a "share" of any X account, you are not entitled to account monetization or any type of future income, the interaction with X is just a way to quickly attract users.

What you're buying is access to a private chat with the account owner, a feature that surprisingly few FT users currently use.

In addition, the way FT generates revenue is not sustainable - most of the earning opportunities for users appear in the early stages of their stock index appreciation.

This attracts a lot of users initially, but fails to retain them.

3.friend.tech economic model is a pyramid model

The pricing curve for shares is not based on supply and demand, but on a quadratic function: the more people want to buy, the price will increase exponentially.

The problem here is that the drop in price is also exponential. That is, the moment the number of buyers no longer outnumbers the number of sellers, the price is at risk of collapsing.

What is the name of an economy that depends on more users coming in to sustain it? The answer is Ponzi.

4. Lack of privacy policy, access to your X account, and custody of your assets

Three risks of interacting with friend.tech that show the team is not so concerned about whether the product is sustainable:

• The platform currently has no privacy policy. If you don't want your data stolen or your public key exposed, please stop using it.
• The app requests permission to access your X account. I suggest you remove permissions in settings.
• You have no management rights to the purchased shares, they are hosted on the platform.

5. The market is full of scams

Since we are in a secular bear market, the market is full of scams and temptations. BALD, PEPE... have been seen frequently.

Frustratingly, there are less than 10,000 users in the market playing poker games, betting the rest on Ponzis, trying to make money from a different Ponzi every week. That is the only thing that those who make a living by speculating can do.

in conclusion

Like all the hype and "narratives" of the past few months: those who got the upper hand will walk away with Leilei, and then laugh at the ordinary users who lost nothing.

If you're an expert at getting into the living pyramid at the beginning and knowing when to get out, then congratulations.

If not, play it safe and don't invest too much money.

Airdrop speculation and the Ponzi economic nature may drive friend.tech to continue to grow, and who knows when the game will stop.