FriendTech now a ghost town as revenues fall 99.9%
FriendTech was once the most popular application on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum-based layer 2 blockchain. It allowed bets on the popularity of Twitter (now X) crypto influencers that FriendTech duplicated onto its platform.
It was, in essence, a BitClout (now Decentralized Social) copycat.
At its September 2023 peak in popularity — one month after Coinbase launched its Base mainnet — FriendTech generated over $1 million per day in fees.
Today, that same protocol has earned less than $60 in the past 24 hours according to data from DefiLlama.
FriendTech advertised “shares” in influencers’ profiles that it quickly renamed “keys” to avoid regulatory issues. Keys were bets on FriendTech profiles, and most people bought them in hopes of making money.
Very few did.
Since October 2023, the total value locked (TVL) of FriendTech assets has declined 91% from $52 million to $4.5 million today.
Even more embarrassingly, fees earned by the protocol over the last month total less than $5,000. Its annualized fee rate is down 99.9% from $180 million in fall 2023 to $60,000 today.
The price of the project’s proprietary token, FRIEND, is down 98% from its all-time high.
Read more: It’s been a messy launch for friend.tech’s FRIEND token
Rather than allow early users to speculate on the price of early FriendTech keys, the platform “bonded” them to a mathematical curve set by a quadratic algorithm that guaranteed very early purchasers paid less than subsequent purchasers.
For a prescribed length of time, keys could only trade on this up-only bonding curve.
Eventually, price controls lapsed and almost all keys fell in value. In 2023, numerous influencers promoted the opportunity for FriendTech keyholders to benefit financially.
Again, few of them ever did.
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