The question asked of any new craze in crypto is \u2014 will it last?<\/p>\n
The latest hot app is friend.tech<\/a>, which creates tradable tokens corresponding to users\u2019 profiles on the X social media platform. Owning someone\u2019s token grants access to a private chat room with them.<\/p>\n The project has surpassed 100,000 users less than two weeks after its launch, according to a popular Dune dashboard<\/a>.<\/p>\n DeFi Dave<\/a>, a well-known educator in the crypto space, thinks friend.tech may demonstrate true durability. \u201cIt\u2019s not the token part,\u201d he told The Defiant. \u201cWhat makes it sticky is that people are so active in the chat.\u201d<\/p>\n friend.tech stands out from other recent trends in crypto like liquid staking tokens (LSTs<\/a>) and real-world assets (RWAs<\/a>) in that it\u2019s as much social as it is financial. Arguably, memecoins<\/a>, another major trend of 2023, are primarily a social phenomenon, but no app or subsector has successfully focused on individuals to the degree that friend.tech has.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first attempt at tokenizing social media \u2014 experiments in token-gated communication have been in the zeitgeist for years. Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, started an app called Earn.com in 2018, which allowed users to \u201ccold email\u201d influential VCs and CEOs, who could respond for a price. Coinbase acquired Earn.com in 2018 before phasing it out in late 2019.<\/p>\n Other experiments like Bitclout<\/a> have assigned tokens to individuals but struggled to gain traction.<\/p>\n friend.tech has generated some of its hype from a weekly airdrop campaign launched on Aug. 18. OKHotShot<\/a>, a well-known on-chain analyst, thinks that interest in the application may fade once the airdrop is complete.<\/p>\n \u201cMost of the time you get a pump up and then it\u2019s down only from there,\u201d he told The Defiant.<\/p>\n DeFi Dave thinks that friend.tech\u2019s users may be sticking around for more than an allocation of tokens. \u201cIf the people on your platform are solely airdrop farmers then you’ve done it wrong,\u201d he said, adding that friend.tech\u2019s core offering was the chat, not the financial aspects which have spurred developers to create tools to trade the social tokens.<\/p>\n \u201cThe apps built around friend.tech are built for traders by traders, but friend.tech itself is not a trader app,\u201d he said.<\/p>\nSocialFi<\/h2>\n
Airdrop Speculation<\/h2>\n
![\"the-defiant\"](\"https:\/\/thedefiant.io\/_next\/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.sanity.io%2Fimages%2F6oftkxoa%2Fproduction%2F472f854e0dfd88f95f1f2ee5f20822037501dcda-1351x539.jpg&w=828&q=75\")