It’s been a while since we last talked about social finance platform FriendTech in The Block’s Data & Insights newsletter.
In other words, the premise of the protocol was that users could purchase keys (previously known as shares) of popular creators. This allowed key holders to get exclusive chat and content from “influencers.” The platform was very novel at launch, and despite its success spawning several clones, it remains the largest SoFi platform by total value to date.
FriendTech also got a boost with its release from Base in late summer. While FriendTech has been generating a lot of hype, the network built on top of it has also generated a wave of excitement, giving it an extra boost.
The protocol has seen quite explosive growth. The platform’s daily trading volume exceeded 500,000 within about a month of launch. There was a time when friends.tech keys were purchased from over 70,000 addresses. But like we said about runes, hype can only get you so far.
As winter approaches, the platform has become largely obscure. From late October to early April, daily transactions on the network did not exceed 40,000.
However, friend.tech activity has started to pick up in the past month, although not at the same level as when the platform first launched. It is now more common to see tens of thousands of transactions per day.
Initially, one of the main benefits for friend.tech users was the friend.tech points earned for participating on the platform. Points have now become a sort of precursor to airdrops, so many people were eager to get their hands on them.
In late January, FriendTech announced that it was temporarily suspending point accruals, distributing 90 million points during the beta period and an additional 10 million points following the launch of v2. The platform’s A truly user-controlled currency, one of the craziest experiments in cryptocurrency history.” It sparked new excitement about airdrops.
The token and v2 launch were originally scheduled for April 29th, following ongoing promotions for accounts through the spring. It was postponed to May 2nd to allow creators to share the airdrop with keyholders, but the snapshot was confirmed for April 27th.
Although points are no longer distributed, the anticipation of the airdrop seems to have been enough to bring people back to FriendTech, as transactions have increased again over the past month.
The airdrop has sparked some backlash due to delays and difficulty in claiming. However, the airdrop was also praised for giving 100% of the tokens to the community rather than investors.
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