Original Author: Alice@Foresight Ventures
There is no doubt that Friend.tech has become a popular fried chicken. When you click on the news and Twitter, the words of praise from KOL investors seem to overflow the screen.
There is nothing new under the sun. Twitter fan tokens are not an innovation. There was Bitcloud supported by a16z before, and the kol community Only 1 and Monaco later.
What is so different about the newbie Friend.tech? Can it bring new opportunities to Web3 Social, which has been dormant for a long time?
1. Stealcam
The friend.tech team is anonymous. According to public information, it was formerly a photo sharing application Stealcam.
StealcamIt is a photo social sharing application. The pictures published on this platform are not free to access but require steal (pay a certain fee) to obtain the right to reveal the picture and view the specific content of the picture. The right to open an image is not available indefinitely, and you can only view the content of the image when you are the latest opener of the image. The team founder is anonymousOG Racer(Twitter @0x RacerAlt) andshrimp（@shrimppepe）。
a. Economic model
Each picture can be stolen an unlimited number of times, and each steal will increase by 10% based on the previous steal price and add 0.001 ETH.
The income generated by each steal will fully return the purchase cost of the previous stealer, and the price difference between the two steals will be distributed between the creator, the previous steal participant and the agreement, where the creator and the previous stealer respectively get 45%, 10% allocated to the agreement.
b. User data
In just two weeks, the cumulative transaction volume of the agreement exceeded 313 ETH (about 500,000 U.S. dollars) based on natural growth alone, and the revenue of the Stealcam Association has reached nearly 100,000 U.S. dollars so far. . Attracted a large number of artists, KOL, and VC partners, such as: USV (Union Square Fund) [co-founder Fred Wilson](https://www.stealcam.com/profiles/0x2Cb5Ae51861A4a6E8568b527cAFC3891317Ac94d) (ranked 14 on the Leaderboard), crypto funds Variant Fund co-founder Li Jin (ranked 25), Variant co-founder Jess (ranked 79), wallet rainbow (ranked 16), etc.
(Stealcam Leaderboard- 2023.3.29)
Based on the success of this product MVP, the team decided to upgrade the product, rebranded it as friend.tech and received a seed round investment from Paradigm.
2. Friend.tech
Friend.tech is a decentralized social platform that is strongly bound to Twitter, allowing users to purchase the share (Share) of any Twitter user on Friend.tech through the Ethereum of the Base chain and become a share holder ( Shareholders) gain the right to communicate directly with them and make profits by buying and selling shares.
a. Economic model
There is currently no clear economic model. The official website is relatively simple, and the white paper and roadmap have not yet been released. What is known so far is that the increase in the Shareholder of each token will lead to an increase in Token, and the transaction requires an additional 10% transaction fee, of which 5% goes to the protocol and 5% goes to the creator.
Different from Stealcam’s unary linear growth, Friend.tech should modify the model parameters so that the price has a quadratic relationship with the number of shareholders, so that the price can rise rapidly (calculated from the Twitter account @functi 0 nZer 0, which has not yet been officially confirmed ):
A quadratic relationship is used between the number of shares held by an individual and the price of the next share. The formula for calculating the next share price is S^2 / 16000 * 1 ETH, where S represents the current number of shareholders.
It is worth noting that in the 1.0 version of stealcam, if the next player purchases the right to open a map from you, your purchase cost will be automatically returned in full and the difference will be earned; while in the 2.0 version of Friend.tech, adding a shareholder only It will lead to benefits for kol and an increase in per share price. As a trader, your paper profits have increased. If you want to increase your profits, you need to pay a 10% transaction fee and choose the right time to make your move.
For users, transaction friction increases, and everyone is more inclined to lock up; on the other hand, the project team uses this mechanism to create a more cohesive community (no longer one-off transaction), helping early participants and influencers Realize high returns and create a myth of perfect wealth creation.
To sum up, the benefits of Friend.tech’s three participants are as follows:
Agreement: Earn 5% commission income from each transaction.
KOL: Spread that earns buying and selling prices, no matter in the rising period or declining period of the agreement, the transaction fee is paid by the buyer and seller of each transaction, and KOL and the agreement party can make a steady profit
User: Become a Shareholder. With each additional Share Holder, the Token price rises rapidly (attracting traffic through the wealth creation effect, thereby pushing up the currency price). Since each transaction requires a 10% transaction fee, short-term trading cannot make a lot of profits, and users are encouraged to lock positions in disguise. This pricing model goes up and down very quickly, with the user bearing all the risk.
b. Data situation
Friend.tech is in the spotlight, with 24-hour protocol fees reaching $1.12 million, surpassing Tron and Uniswap and ranking third, behind Ethereum and Lido, with the number of active addresses in 24 hours reaching 20k.
3. Author’s opinion
1. Friend.tech’s marketing strategy combines the strengths of many companies, focusing on short-term and high-frequency intensive PR. Regardless of content methods/time points/community selection, it can be called a classic case. Strategies include: creating a sense of mystery in the early stage, cold start by KOL calling orders, Invite code hunger marketing, VC endorsement and subsequent publicity.
2. The user growth strategy is also excellent, giving KOLs and users enough incentives and future expectations, and relying on the power of the community to achieve rapid fission growth.
3. The Base community generally lacks risk awareness, and Friend’s official website does not disclose any project information except for products. The overwhelming marketing focus is obviously on user growth/transaction volume/first-line community comparison, but few articles analyze its tokenomics economic model. It seems to be a deliberate attempt to arouse public FOMO.
4. The overall model is very Ponzi, and it also has a strong wealth creation effect and community foundation. If a community culture and unique discourse system can be established before the collapse, it may be sustainable. On the contrary, if everyone buys Shares with a buying and selling mentality, a certain price threshold/a Token explosion will generate a large number of selling and price avalanche.
5. Launched a points system to increase user activity, stimulate retail investors to further invest and CX their own Tokens. Of course, from the perspective of fission efficiency analysis, although Twitter has a large user base, Base chain interaction/deposits and withdrawals are still a high-threshold matter, and will most likely need to be optimized in the future.
6. Judging from the financing situation, the seed round of financing has been completed from Paradigm. You can track the follow-up situation. The team can use this part of the money to issue airdrops, allowing share holders to obtain additional income instead of simply speculating on buying and selling shares.
4. Future Outlook: Use Creator Economy + Tokenomics to Create a Growth Flywheel
It is still too early to judge the success or failure of this project, but Friend.tech’s success in community marketing has verified that Social+Fi is an excellent means of acquiring customers. Distributing benefits well and providing an Incentive promotion community for KOLs and retail investors is undoubtedly the fastest and most native way to grow.
Viewed in a larger context, in social track products, it is feasible to combine token and creator economy, especially to provide token incentives for core creators to leverage the fan base to achieve a cold start. This approach is PMF ( Product-Market-Fit) has begun to take shape (at least it can ensure that the project will achieve good results in the first step of cold start). Based on this idea, the directions that can be further explored in the future include:
Web3 Only Fans: Users can unlock chats and encrypted pictures after paying, and fan tokens serve as entry barriers and DID. Like PopPlanet. This model is suitable for most mid-waist and even amateur KOLs, with a larger base.
Content co-creation: A community established with well-known IP/NFT communities/creator groups as the core. Creators can obtain token rewards by attracting more fans to participate, produce co-created works, and consume content. Such as storyverse, story protocol.
Fan investment economy: men’s and women’s teams on the chain, e-sports on the chain, etc. Relying on the influence of idols to attract fans to buy web3 support products, the artists themselves can get a higher profit share. This model relies heavily on a single IP and requires high visibility.
Reference
https://friends.tech/
https://twitter.com/functi0nzer0/status/1689959257918095360?s=21&t=X4Xd35KaL80efKplDWzOYA
https://tokeninsight.com/en/news/decentralized-social-platform-friend.tech-received-investment-from-paradigm
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/friend-tech-friend-foe-dive-192509528.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMgB7s9pFaOGQ1CHKl7hq08_Ay_9206YSjczXasLpg7mJZV7NGPhdVVvk5BGg5az2IabF1F2cbb8KVeyNDnc9U0y0sdhLFd7dt5l423tHap90csa7rfdeMf-Q2-9 2d QHkhKHwzf-dhIfFAzxaNEHVOIIDtCocCeo61AGGz4hCDHh
https://www.odaily.news/post/5186091
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fBr0jej2x9V-Q7mVDavhcg
About Foresight Ventures
Foresight Ventures is betting on the innovation process of cryptocurrency in the next few decades. It manages multiple funds: VC funds, secondary active management funds, multi-strategy FOF, and special purpose S fund Foresight Secondary Fund l. The total asset management scale exceeds 4 One hundred million U.S. dollars. Foresight Ventures adheres to the concept of Unique, Independent, Aggressive, Long-term and provides extensive support for projects through strong ecological power. Its team comes from senior people from top financial and technology companies including Sequoia China, CICC, Google, Bitmain and other top financial and technology companies.
Website: https://www.foresightventures.com
Disclaimer: All Foresight Ventures articles are not intended as investment advice. Investment involves risks. Please evaluate your personal risk tolerance and make prudent investment decisions.
