On Friends and Tech

Friendtech has one major problem, and it is in its lack of a loop.

To recap: FT allows you to buy keys to access chat rooms for specific people. Due to a bonding curve, the price exponentially goes up the more holders there are for the key.

What’s the problem here?

• FriendTech is semi-private, which makes discovery difficult. This leads to tapping into existing social clout, not the creation of a new one. And IMO, creating a new form of celebrity is the validating hallmark of a new social media.

  • To be fair, there were quite a few FriendTech stars, but it leaned on having capital, like the (3,3) strategy of you buy my key, I buy yours.

• On established celebrities: there were bots buying any established Twitter account with a following. This rewarded the creator with a big upfront payoff in trading fees and left no incentive to stay and respond to key holders.

It’s not really FT’s fault, but rather, there’s this obsession across crypto to reward people being early. First to snipe a sale, grab liquidity rewards, etc. This can work for DeFi, but not as much for social or creators.

I partly think it might be due to the technical challenges, but crypto social at least needs recurring payments.

It’s not enough to to make people pay, because social requires to figure out how to make people stay.