friend.tech: An Illusory and Beautiful Web3 Social Bubble

Original Title: FriendTech (FT) is not an interesting use case for SocialFi.

Original Author: Gabriel Bearlz

Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News

friend.tech (FT) is not an interesting use case for SocialFi, but rather a Ponzi scheme disguised as a "social experiment," driven by the irresponsible behavior of KOLs in a market full of scams.

The reasons are as follows:

The project founder has a history of initiating "financial experiments" and then abandoning them

The founder of friend.tech, @0xRacerAlt, is also the founder of TweetDAO and Stealcam, both of which claim to be "social experiments."

TweetDAO was created in 2022, allowing its NFT holders to post content on the project's Twitter account (yes, that's it). But soon after, the Twitter account was suspended.

Stealcam was launched in March this year, proposing an auction mechanism where users could pay to view "secret photos" from certain accounts. Currently, the project's Twitter account has been suspended, and the website's usage is nearly zero.

These three projects share the same characteristics:

• They promise to conduct "social experiments."
• They have a pyramid-like economic structure.
• They lasted a few months before being shut down.

There are few use cases, and no economic incentives for creators to stay on the platform

What keeps me skeptical about the long-term viability of friend.tech is the very low intrinsic value of its use cases.

You are not buying a "share" of any X account; you have no rights to the account's monetization or any type of future income. Interacting with X is merely a way to quickly attract users.

What you are purchasing is the right to have private chats with the account owner, and surprisingly, very few FT users currently utilize this feature.

Moreover, the way FT generates revenue is not sustainable—most users' opportunities to make money arise during the initial exponential appreciation of their shares.

This may attract many users at first, but it fails to retain them.

The economic model of friend.tech is a pyramid scheme

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

The problem here is that the price decline is also exponential. In other words, the moment the number of buyers is no longer greater than the number of sellers, the price begins to face the risk of collapse.

What do you call an economy that relies on more users entering to sustain itself? The answer is a Ponzi scheme.

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

Three risks associated with interacting with friend.tech indicate that the team is not particularly concerned about the sustainability of the product:

• The platform currently has no privacy policy. If you don't want your data to be stolen or your public key exposed, stop using it.
• The application requests access to your X account. I recommend you revoke this permission in the settings.
• You have no management rights over the shares you purchase; they are hosted on the platform.

The market is flooded with scams

As we are in a prolonged bear market, the market is filled with scams and temptations. BALD, PEPE… have become commonplace.

Frustratingly, there are fewer than 10,000 users in the market playing speculative games, betting the rest on Ponzi schemes, trying to make money weekly from different Ponzi schemes. This is all that those who make a living through speculation can do.

Conclusion

Just like all the hype and "narratives" of the past few months: those who get in early will leave with substantial gains, while mocking the ordinary users who lose everything.

If you are an expert at entering the pyramid early and knowing when to exit, congratulations.

If not, proceed with caution and do not invest too much money.

Airdrop speculation and the nature of Ponzi economics may drive friend.tech to continue growing, but no one knows when the game will stop.