Friend.tech is gone, what should we rely on? — Where is the future of crypto social?

Author: Pzai, Foresight News

Introduction

As the daily active users of Friend.tech have sharply decreased to less than a hundred, crypto social seems to be exiting the spotlight. On one hand, social projects primarily based on crypto economic models are fading from attention; on the other hand, crypto social-related applications like Farcaster and Solana Blinks are using different entry points to make social interactions a means of traffic diversion, bringing new growth possibilities to the ecosystem. This article aims to explore how crypto social can be constructed based on the characteristics of various projects.

What Happened to Friend.tech?

Yes, the once-glorious Friend.tech is now hardly mentioned. Some may still reminisce about the bustling atmosphere when they entered early, while others recall the dopamine rush from buying and selling keys. Of course, it must be said that at that time, FT was a great product; at least during that relatively bear market phase, the Ponzi-like social structure indeed provided a venue for capital and players to engage.

If we categorize the human social process as a logic of fulfilling instincts (intrinsic drives), we can roughly split them into animalistic and communal aspects. The animalistic aspect represents humanity's pursuit of survival resources, while the communal aspect more often guides individuals to enhance their sense of identity through relational connections. For Friend.tech, we can see how it utilized these instinctual tendencies to establish its economic model.

• Individual-Centric Community Building: Consensus is built upon the maintenance of individual influence, bringing in tokens and attention through the organic migration of influence. The advantage of this model is that it can grant early participants the highest degree of influence monetization and help individuals achieve a flywheel effect of influence. Meanwhile, similar cognitions lead to the aggregation of consensus, generating certain intrinsic value and addressing the communal pursuit.
• Key as a Transaction Medium: As a credential for accessing specific channels, the value of the Key is priced through a Bonding Curve and accumulates resources through trading growth, which can be divided into two phases: the early phase (establishing an initial community through early adopters) and the later phase (the value of the Key serving as a backing for itself).

Clearly, such construction brings some issues, including growth limitations due to the ceiling effect and resistance in community consensus building due to high speculative participation. As a certain anonymous large holder stated, "Friend.tech ultimately became speculation itself; no one wanted to chat, everyone just wanted to trade Keys." It seems that when participants are not there purely for social needs, all interactions within the protocol are quickly confined to the realm of token economics, and the increasingly closed social model diverts many participants into different small communities, leading to a relatively dry overall content ecosystem. The limited discussion space may be a constraint on the communities derived from Friend.tech and restrict broader interactions. In this scenario, the narrative of social interaction is unlikely to sustain, and the point system adopted by the project at that time also affected holders' confidence (specific discussions on points can be reviewed in the author's previous writings).

Through the example of Friend.tech, we can see that constructing social networks through crypto economic models has many pain points, such as the economic model directly determining the sustainability of social interactions within the protocol and creators leaning more towards economic demands within the protocol. For creators, economic incentives may not be one of the main intrinsic drives for creation; what they need more is broad interaction and the collision of ideas. In this regard, the economic model inevitably leads to limited reach for creators, which does not meet the expectations of many. Therefore, what we will discuss next is how a protocol driven primarily by social interaction, the rising star Farcaster, achieves a certain level of exchange and discussion.

(Some) Creators' Thoughts

What Did Farcaster Do?

It can be said that at its inception, Farcaster had almost no connection to token economics. The few points of connection might be that early participants had a strong crypto-native style, such as Ethereum OGs and crypto investors. Thanks to the strict invitation-only selection by founder Dan Romero, the quality of early users ensured social interactions while also setting the tone for the protocol's development, namely a "new crypto community" driven by social interaction. This community differs from typical internal groups and has a certain sense of community boundaries compared to applications like X, which is conducive to the cultivation of community culture. Under the influence of crypto-native culture, token economics is slowly entering the social process as an interaction medium.

A notable example is the success of DEGEN, which was initially launched as a reward token in the Farcaster Degen channel and airdropped to active members within the channel, achieving the following three points:

• Initial Community Building: Through genuine social interactions, a group with high interaction rates and strong consensus was established, which in turn generated strong growth.
• Angel Round Financing: The angel round financing led by 1confirmation in February (490.5 ETH) became a favorable catalyst for developing the DEGEN-related ecosystem.
• Boundary Construction: The interaction between the channel and outside prompts curiosity and encourages discussions based on more community-oriented topics rather than being limited to individual tweets, thereby consolidating consensus while enhancing user engagement.

From the perspective of daily active user growth, DEGEN became the starting point for everything, even becoming a cultural symbol of the Base ecosystem.

However, at this time, people also began to notice some resistance emerging. The distribution model of DEGEN underwent changes with mechanisms like active badges and staking, and each change was accompanied by fluctuations in consensus. Moreover, at the end of March this year, the Layer 3 narrative of Degen Chain was also launched vigorously, and everyone believed that DEGEN was the future of Farcaster and even Base. However, I believe that for a project primarily centered around MEME as its narrative point, Buidl signifies indecision for the market, especially when the construction of consensus has not yet settled. Indeed, Buidl represents a long-termism philosophy, but in the rapidly changing crypto market, the ecological niche of each project is determined by its current state. If there are no real breakthroughs in ecological construction, then the climax will not continue.

Embracing the ecosystem is certainly not wrong, and having use cases is also a considerable advancement. Even within the ecosystem, projects like Drakula (a Degen-supported Web3 TikTok) provide users with diverse services. However, as market enthusiasm began to wane, consensus faded as well. Yet, I have always believed that Farcaster's innovations have already achieved sufficient lead compared to other social protocols, including the innovation of Frames as an interaction paradigm within the protocol, allowing for co-construction by project parties through open third-party clients. Most importantly, its social graph and framework are open, forming the foundation for everything. Therefore, I believe that in the future, there will definitely be more organic use cases providing fresh blood for the on-chain social ecosystem.

Blinks - A Broad Solution

Solana Blinks embeds an interactive interface within links and conducts transactions through wallets in the browser. As an application with interaction logic similar to Frames, the two also have many differences:

• Reach: Solana Blinks' multi-platform reach allows for a broad user distribution and direct transactions through wallets. In contrast, Frames interacts through wallet addresses bound to Farcaster, signing through accounts rather than wallets.
• Openness: Both allow developers to embed corresponding components in the frontend and extend interaction methods, and both project parties provide relevant support for developers.
• Integration: Ultimately, the goal of such interaction methods is to bridge users' on-chain and off-chain experiences.
• Technical Implementation: Solana Actions encapsulates on-chain transactions as APIs, achieving universal frontend implementation through Blinks; Farcaster Frames transforms static embeds into interactive experiences through OpenGraph standards.

Overall, Blinks does not integrate social interaction itself but brings users a more customized experience by embedding on-chain behaviors into social interactions. In other words, Blinks can be embedded into any stream (for example, it can be embedded in Notion), thereby generating more use cases. In the future, we can also look forward to social use cases based on Blinks.

Conclusion

Building a social ecosystem organically integrated with blockchain has always been a focus of the market, and existing projects can be said to have their own merits. Just like the tides of the crypto market, the spotlight of attention will not stay forever, so project parties must adapt to the situation and design products with respect for users and communities in mind to carve out a path in the social arena.

As the sands of time sift, let time provide the answers it deserves.