New Social Trading App Attracts 12,000 Users In Less Than Two Days

Crypto traders love nothing more than a new project, especially ones which mix social status and financial speculation.

The latest trend? friend.tech, an invite-only application which asks users to connect their Twitter accounts in order to make “shares” of themselves available for trading on the new platform.

friend.tech already has over 12,500 individual traders since its Aug. 10 launch and has facilitated over 5,500 ETH ($10M) in volume, according to a Dune dashboard for the project.

Those are relatively big numbers for a quiet crypto market — OpenSea and Blur, the two leading NFT marketplaces, have had roughly 10,000 traders combined in the past day.

Seraphim Czecher, a contributor at stETH issuer Lido Finance, isn’t writing off friend.tech as a fad just yet. “It’s buggy and new but has potential,” he told The Defiant. Shares in Czecher were going for 0.01 ETH ($20) at the time of writing.

Crypto influencer Cobie, the host of the popular UpOnly podcast, currently has the highest valuation — his shares are changing hands at almost 1.5 ETH ($2,700).

People have tried to create similar social-token applications before — Bitclout is one such example which took the crypto world by storm in 2021 only to fizzle out as quickly as it burst onto the scene.

Private Chat Rooms

friend.tech does have an intriguing feature — buying shares of a person opens up a private chat room between the buyer and the share issuer.

Since most people with large followings tend to have their DMs turned off on social media platforms like Twitter or Discord, this is a feature which could potentially have value beyond the initial frenzy.

Additionally, when a person’s shares are bought and sold, they earn a fee, according to a screen in the application’s login flow.

friend.tech is deployed on Base, the new Layer 2 network from Coinbase that launched this week. It’s currently the most popular app on the new blockchain.

For those looking to try out the platform — which requires linking a Twitter account and funding a new wallet with ETH on Base — one of the three buttons at the bottom of the app promises an airdrop that will commence on Aug. 18.