👉🏻 One year after its launch, the once-popular SocialFi leader, http://friend.tech, set the ownership address of the smart contract to 0x0000.. (abandoning permissions), chose soft rug, and officially announced community autonomy.
Recently, the team also transferred all of this income to Coinbase for shipment, confirming the dissolution and death of the friend project.
friend was launched on August 10, 2023. As of today, just after its first anniversary, the most common response to it is: a good hand played badly 😂
🌘 The past glory
In just two weeks, friend.tech achieved an astonishing achievement of increasing the number of users from 0 to over 100,000, and subsequently accumulated more than 900,000 users.
Key’s daily transaction volume reached 20 million US dollars, and the protocol revenue reached 1,000 ETH 10 days after its launch. The total protocol revenue reached 25,600 ETH, making it the fastest growing blockchain protocol.
Since its launch, it has generated approximately $89.29 million in fee income, of which $44.67 million was distributed to creators and the remainder belongs to the friend.tech team.
👀 Project Status
A year later, Friend's active users have dropped to tens or even single digits, and transaction volume has dropped to hundreds of dollars.
💡 Other SocialFi worth noting
In fact, SocialFi is also divided into social platform and social protocol. Even if Friend is a social platform, I personally think that compared with the social platform, the social protocol may be a more decentralized and better solution.
→ Here are some social protocols worth noting:
Farcaster
Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol that focuses on user data ownership and privacy protection. It is highly recommended by Vitalik Buterin, who likes to post a few messages on it every day.
Users can maintain a unified social identity across different decentralized applications. Through integrated applications such as Warpcast, users can mint NFTs or earn internal points "Warps" that are used to unlock platform-specific features (such as NFT minting and social channel creation).
While Warps Points are not blockchain tokens, they are used to incentivize users to participate and contribute to the community, and determine the size of future airdrops.
Profit model: Mainly through user activities on the platform and paid features, such as minting NFTs, creating social channels, etc.
Lens Protocol
A decentralized social protocol based on the Polygon blockchain that allows users to own and control their content and social networks. Lens Protocol supports the publishing, collection and monetization of content, and users can earn income by collecting and trading content.
Revenue model: Profit from transactions and fees from using Lens native features, such as content collection and transaction features.
CyberConnect
CyberConnect is a decentralized social graph protocol, invested in by Binance, that allows users to control their digital identity and social relationships.
It supports multi-chain operations (such as Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Polygon), and provides social identity management and interoperability capabilities for Web3 applications. Users can carry social interactions between different platforms, support content creation, and integrate with applications.
Profit model: Profits are made by charging transaction and interaction fees within the platform, such as content creation and identity management transactions of users on different DApps
Deso (Decentralized Social)
Deso is a blockchain designed specifically for decentralized social networks, supporting a variety of decentralized social media applications. Users can earn token rewards by posting and interacting, while the platform also allows creators to profit directly from their content.
Profit model: Profit from transaction fees when users publish content, use of platform native tokens, etc.
✨ Conclusion
It is a pity that friend.tech, once a social unicorn, has fallen to this point in just one year.
New narratives and models can certainly allow projects to reap huge profits in a short period of time, but long-term development requires listening to community feedback and continuous iteration.
The decline of friend.tech is not unrelated to this. Now that Telegram has begun to close down, the way SocialFi plays may be very different from before. I hope it can provide some warnings and references for subsequent SocialFi projects.
