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What Happened To All The Friendtechs?
Niklas Polk
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Key Takeaways
9 min read
  • Friendtech is the undisputed market leader thanks to its $42m TVL, but also in terms of volume, revenue, and users.
  • The strongest competitors are in this order New Bitcoin City ($2.7m TVL on NOS), Tomo ($780k TVL on Linea), Stars Arena ($740k TVL on Avalanche), and Post Tech ($160k TVL Arbitrum).
  • So far they all feel very similar from a user’s perspective and have the same key, fee, and airdrop points mechanics, whereas Post Tech, and to a lesser extent New Bitcoin City, have the most unique UIs.
  • Many of the top accounts exist across multiple platforms, enabling access to their content at cheaper prices in case of cross-posting.
  • As all friendtech competitors are built on different platforms, their keys might profit from the narratives of the networks they are built on - e.g. New Bitcoin City from the Bitcoin narrative.
  • Friendtech has by far the lowest 24h-volume-to-TVL ratio at 0.03, indicating that it might have transitioned from a launch and speculation phase to a retention phase.
  • The incentive system with cubic price curves and inexistence of a secondary market seems to drive TVL up very fast within the first 2-3 weeks of launch but then fails to capture retention and activity as this is not incentivized except for “points” which do not have any value yet.
  • Generally, most metrics for these SoFi projects have been trending downward with few signs of reversal.

Introduction

Following the meteoric rise of friendtech, the social app on Base, all eyes were on Social Finance or SoFi. Their innovative share model sparked excitement in times of generally low on-chain activity and got people “gambling” again.

Given this success, the open-source nature of friendtech’s smart contracts led to a variety of forks. This is not necessarily a “bad thing”, as transparency is one of the key values of the space, competition can be healthy, and different minds can give the same idea different flavors.

But how does the SoFi landscape look now, what happened to all the friendtech-like projects, and most importantly, are there any investment opportunities within that landscape?

To answer these questions, this...