I hate this journey for me.
I've been trying to ignore whatever the F this Friend.Tech thing is, but people just keep talking about it. Twitter also seems to be obsessed right now with fantasizing about being a gun owner and having someone break into their house. So it was a toss up between discussing blowhard right-wingers and libertarians talking out their asses like a teenager on AOL, or Friend.Tech. I picked friend tech because the content seems more relevant, but maybe I shouldn't have!
First off to truly understand what it is you need a phone.
I always get really annoyed by services that only exist as phone apps because I don't use my phone that often and I don't like installing new things that want access to every tidbit of data on my device. Not going to install this garbage.
Well I guess I don't know if it's garbage or not do I? This is where my bias comes in. As someone that's 100% all in on Hive perhaps my maximalism is showing in that I instinctively don't want to give other platforms a chance to shine. It's possible, but then the second I actually started researching Friend.Tech just now I was like lol nope I was right this is garbage. Trust your instincts, bruvs.
This is the Tweet that finally prompted me to look into it.
This sparked my interest because I had this exact idea years ago. I was calling it... hell my memory is so bad what was it again? It was a loan protocol for Hive. Basically every account on Hive would get their own token. This token would represent your brand and the tokens could be organized as loans designed to be paid back, or simply shares that were bought and sold on the open market. In any case we could think of it as each account gets a new kind of reputation based either on debt or brand value.
Ah okay I remember now.
The protocol was called Soul Shards. Wow look at the date on that post, lol. 2018, and I still haven't built anything cool on Hive. WEAK! In any case Soul Shards is a vague reference to World of Warcraft (Warlock class) combined with the idiom of "selling your soul". Tongue-in-cheek type vibe; nothing serious.
I actually referenced this idea in a much more recent post talking about how 20% HBD yields completely decimate the loan side of the equation. There would be zero financial incentive to give anyone a loan on Hive when all liquidity is being incentivized to sit timelocked in the savings accounts. Nobody taking a loan would ever agree to pay more than 20% interest rates... or maybe they would considering low-end credit cards are sitting at ridiculous rates like 28% (but this doesn't matter because the offer will never offset counter-party risk). A decade ago low-end cards were more like 18%-21%. Sign of the times.
If I'm being honest I'm a little annoyed that @taskmaster4450 never acknowledges that locking money into the savings accounts cripples our free-flowing liquidity and is just bad economics. At the same time the situation is a lot more nuanced than that because his vision for HBD involves bond derivatives based on the timelock, so perhaps his vision of HBD is even grander than mine. Impressive feat.
What was I talking about again?
Oh yeah... Friend.Tech.
So the very first thing I see when I search Google is basically...
This is a completely unsustainable fad.
Why would I immediately make this assessment? Because everyone is making a big deal about how many fees the app has generated. lol, fees. On a social media app. Stupid. Fees are friction. Friction seizes the engine of commerce. Duh.
Celebrating a shiny new thing during its first few weeks like this is just so classic crypto. Hype hype hype and then it falls off the face of the planet. Remember when Mark Zuckerberg tried to create a Twitter competitor and everyone was using it for like 2 seconds? Yeah, how's that going? The word 'sheeple' comes to mind for some reason.
Every one of these headlines is a bad sign.
Funny how they are all spun to imply the exact opposite. Friend.Tech secures seed round funding? Really? Might as well say: "centralized app is centralized but let's pretend it's decentralized". Classic crypto. "Overtakes Tron & Uniswap in fees". Paying high fees isn't sustainable. How many new crypto products are just as quickly forgotten?
Will any of these chuckleheads come forward and admit they were wrong about Friend.Tech? No, OF COURSE NOT. When has that EVER happened? They'll just ignore the terrible report they made and move on to the next shiny new thing and repeat the process all over again. This aint my first rodeo. Crypto people are clinically insane and keep performing the exact same actions expecting a different result. Either that or they're just bored and want to feel something. One of those.
And I haven't even clicked any of the links yet.
I tried to read the Coingape article on it but it won't load so Cointelegraph it is.
Friend.tech, a recently released decentralized social (DeSo) network, generated over $1 million in fees in 24 hours on Aug. 19, outperforming established players in the crypto ecosystem, including Uniswap and the Bitcoin network.
Again it's just flabbergasting to immediately see some dipshit reporting that shiny new week old product has "outperformed" protocols that have been around for years or even over a decade. And the metric they use are the fees generated... over a 24 hour period. Yikes. So much yikes. I can't get over it. Also calling it decentralized and then hailing a centralized round of seed funding is some nice icing on the shitcake.
The platform was launched in beta version on Aug. 11 and allows users to tokenize their social network by buying and selling “shares” of their connections, enabling a person who purchases another’s share to send private messages to each other. The protocol reportedly charges a 5% fee on transactions, with the spread from trades representing the owner’s profit.
5% fees? lol
And people are impressed that they've generated high fees? What an absolute dumpster fire. "Pay me and you'll be allowed to talk to me." Really? Wow. I just can't right now.
Built on Coinbase's layer-2 Base, the platform has seen considerable activity.
Ew
So it's a centralized app built on top of a centralized app.
Cool story bro. Please tell it walking.
Behind the project is believed to be the pseudonymous developer Racer.
Hm I guess that's kind of cool until a rugpull happens.
Racer previously created social media networks TweetDAO and Stealcam.
Oh the SPIN!
So this guy has already created two other failed apps that he's no longer working on but instead of implying that this third one will also be a complete failure the vibe is that his resume is strong. Eat my ass.
Pseudonymous decentralized finance researcher Ignas noted that under Friend.tech's current business model, “revenue comes only from trading fees but not from having more shareholders,”
adding that “controversial personalities might earn more or even creating FUD will be used as a strategy to earn fees.”
I mean that's a good point but literally the least of my concerns given the sheer abundance of red flags littered throughout the entire concept. This platform won't even make it far enough for this to become a problem imo.
Conclusion
The advent of Friend.Tech is quite similar to NOSTR. Remember NOSTR? Yeah, me neither. Terrible name; terrible brand; terrible tech. Friend.Tech is no different. Crypto users will always get suckered in by shiny new thing, especially during a boring crab market that just trades sideways for over a year.
The best thing about Friend.Tech is that it further evidences the idea that the next big bull-market narrative is going to be WEB3 decentralized social media. That's good for Hive in the long-run even if we continue to get completely drowned out by the noise in the short-term. Owning your digital identity is important. Most will need to learn this the hard way after onboarding to garbage like Friend.Tech and realizing it has none of the benefits of actual WEB3.
The 5% fee on this platform is taking a lion's share of wealth, extracting it from the masses, and giving it to a centralized agent while everyone else gets table-scraps (why else would it get seeded by VCs?). But it's totally decentralized. Yeah, let's go with that.
The 5% fee will screech this platform to a halt just like all those shitty hyper-deflationary DEFI tokens from 2020 (Cakepop anyone?). Except in this case the yield from the fees doesn't even get pumped back into the protocol and is instead extracted by a centralized agent... so it's even worse than the most unsustainable flywheels we saw in 2020. Truly incredible what people are willing to do to participate in 'web3' social media, all the while making believe that it's going to work out. This model is mathematically impossible. They're charging x50 higher fees than Binance to make a trade, and the assets being traded are largely worthless fungible NFTs. Enjoy it while it lasts, because the music will stop on this within a month or two just like all the other bullshit we've seen.
If I'm being honest it was nice to "research" a new thing, if you can call reading one 300 word Cointellegraph article "research". Still, I'm left enraged that we've been in this business for half a decade and the same greedy people are still pulling the same greedy shenanigans. When will the real ones arrive, I wonder.