Author: Biteye core contributor Louis Wang
Editor: Crush, core contributor of Biteye
Community: @BiteyeCN
The Socialfi craze driven by Friend.Tech has swept across various public chains, and almost every chain has its own copycats, which have also created quite a lot of popularity, such as Stars Arena on Avalanche and TOMO on Linea. This article will compare FT with these two copycats in terms of product experience, data, etc.
01、Friend.Tech
As the pioneer of this wave of Socialfi craze, it has brought new narratives to the crypto market while firmly sitting on the leading position. In the three months since its launch, the cumulative number of users has exceeded 75k and the TVL has exceeded $44M.
(Source：https://dune.com/friendtechdatateam/friendtechdata)
Although many keys are already quite expensive due to the overly steep pricing curve, and the transaction volume has dropped significantly compared to the previous two weeks, it is interesting that the number of new users continues to grow, with daily growth even reaching a new high, and there are still many new users pouring in.
(Source：https://dune.com/whale_hunter/friend-tech-ultimate-analytics)
At the same time, although there have been recent reports of SIM SWAP leading to the theft of FT users’ funds, the negative news does not seem to have a significant impact on FT.
The profitable funds did not leave the market quickly, and a large amount of idle funds remained in Friend.Tech, so the TVL did not decline significantly due to trading volume or potential risks.
(Source：https://dune.com/21co/friendtech-analysis)
For the popular Chinese accounts on FT, please refer to the dashboard:
https://www.cryptohunt.ai/zh-CN/friendtech/topcn
02、Stars Arena
Stars Arena is a FT product on Avalanche. It is similar to FT in that you can enter the other party’s private chat room by purchasing a ticket.
An obvious functional difference is that SA is more like Twitter, where content can be published and presented in the form of information streams, and user operations are more diverse.
In addition to room chatting, you can also like, forward, comment and even reward "tweets". The social elements are richer than FT, and it is even a bit like Farcaster with private chat and group functions.
(Source：https://www.techflowpost.com/article/detail_14130.html)
SA was first launched on the PC side. Like FT, the mobile side requires adding the web page to the desktop. The registration and recharge process is similar to FT. AVAX is recharged with the Avalanche C chain as the trading currency. The overall experience is much smoother than FT. In terms of fission, it uses invitation links and has a rebate mechanism to encourage dissemination.
The economic model also takes a 10% commission on transactions, but the distribution ratio is different from FT. SA distributes 7% of the profit to the homeowner, 2% belongs to the platform, and the remaining 1% is used for rebate rewards, which means that when the transaction volume is the same, the homeowner's income on SA will be higher than FT.
SA has a positive guiding role in increasing daily activity for Avalanche, and has received strong support from Avalanche officials and founders, who have all settled in SA. SA's TVL peaked at over $2.5M, with nearly 25k users.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long. On October 7, SA’s contract was attacked by hackers who replayed the contract and stole all users’ assets in the contract, worth about $2.9M of AVAX.
In the end, SA recovered 90% of the stolen assets. The contract has passed the audit and the product was re-launched on the 17th. After the launch, users need to migrate their wallets in the App before they can trade the assets they previously owned.
(Source：https://dune.com/_d3f4ult/starsarena)
Obviously, the contract theft has caused huge damage to users' confidence. The assets recovered to $2.9M, and one-third of the funds flowed out on the same day. The TVL has been falling all the way and currently remains at $1.2M.
03、ENTER
Users are quite positive about the imitation platforms on the new L2. Those who missed out on FT don’t want to miss out on the imitation platforms again. There is also the expectation of adding interactive airdrops on the new public chain, which potentially allows them to kill two birds with one stone.
TOMO is an FT clone on Linea. Unlike FT, it is not a web page that needs to be added to the home screen, but an App that needs to be downloaded from the App Store.
The entire registration process is very similar to FT. You need to bind to Twitter and recharge. You can recharge from the main network or from Linea.
Although the wallet in the app currently supports withdrawals, private keys cannot be exported because it uses the ERC-4337 standard account abstraction wallet. This is 4337’s first attempt at SocialFi.
The product functions are similar, and you can enter a private chat room by purchasing a Key. Different from FT, in addition to Key, there is another asset, Vote, which is Twitter users who have not yet opened a TOMO account.
Users can buy “futures” of their keys, and once they open a TOMO account, Votes can be converted into Keys.
In the economic model, votes and keys follow the same rules, that is, 5% of the transaction will be given to the platform and 5% will be given to the homeowner, which is consistent with FT.
For those who have not yet settled in but whose votes have been traded and fees have been incurred, the transaction fees will be accumulated and retained in the unopened room as fees to be collected. If the owner does not settle in within six months, the fees will be distributed to the vote holders.
The pricing curve followed by TOMO is key price = x^2/43370. The price curve is smoother than that of FT, which means that for the same number of key holders, the price of TOMO will be about 37% of FT, which is more conducive to small retail consumption and is equivalent to expanding the capacity of the chat room.
This is a very interesting micro-innovation. On FT, there are a large number of robots, called Snipers, that are watching KOLs who have just opened accounts. They try to buy the keys of these KOLs at a low price as soon as possible to make a profit.
TOMO eliminates the robot’s advantage in this regard by converting the keys of unopened accounts into futures.
In terms of eliminating the influence of robots, TOMO allows users to purchase multiple keys at one time on the front end of the application.
On FT, users can only purchase one key at a time in the app, but there is no limit on the number of keys in the contract. Some users use robots to purchase multiple keys at a time, which is fast and cheap (buying one by one with someone in between will increase the purchase cost), but it actually affects the experience of ordinary users.
With these two small adjustments, there is not much room for robots to play on TOMO, so the user experience is relatively pure.
Similar to FriendTech, TOMO also has points. Currently, the information is only related to inviting friends, and it is likely to be linked to Linea's points in the future.
TOMO has the deep involvement of the founders of Polychain, Ankr, and Galex, and Linea has also officially settled in, with sufficient brand endorsement. At the same time, Linea is a public chain with a high probability of airdrops, making it suitable for early participation.
Currently, TOMO's TVL has reached $1.3M, which is 40 times higher than the leading company FriendTech's TVL of $44M. There is plenty of room for imagination, but most of the active KOLs on TOMO are from the Chinese-speaking region, while KOLs from the English-speaking region participate less, and the user growth rate has stagnated somewhat.
TOMO has earned $414k through transaction fees and has 4.9k cumulative users.
(Source: https://app.sentio.xyz/sentio/tomo/dashboards/mfqtRDSI)
04. Conclusion
This article analyzes and compares the current situation of FT and the two most competitive imitation products, as shown in the figure below.
Compared with FT, SA has a lot more social functions, higher creator rewards and smooth experience, which are very exciting. Unfortunately, it collapsed midway and the contract was stolen, which dealt a heavy blow to user confidence. Even if it is restored online now, the TVL has plummeted.
TOMO is more like an upgraded version of FT, with smoother operation and presented in the form of an App. At the same time, it pays great attention to solving the negative impact of robots in FT.
Through functional design, unfair competition among robots has been eliminated as much as possible, and the design is more mature and ingenious.
If there were no security issues, it would be a very strong competitor to FT, but currently it lacks more participation from KOLs outside the Chinese-speaking regions.
Compared with the excellent performance of copycat platforms, FT is at a disadvantage in product experience and its update speed is not fast enough, which may soon become a point of criticism. However, its pioneering influence, the depth of the TVL fund pool, and the early participation and investment of a large number of high-quality users and KOLs, and even empowerment, as well as the sunk costs of earning points, have become its deepest moat.
Currently, only FT has announced its financing situation, and the rest of the projects are all riding on the expectations given by FT. The next wave of acceleration requires more financing and airdrop information as catalysts.
This wave of SocialFi craze driven by FT is one of the few hot spots in the bear market. As a new type of social trading asset, Key may be the next ERC20 and is worth participating in and looking forward to.
