The boat of friendship is overturned, and friend.tech cleans up the bot account, and TVL falls by two percent

撰文：Kaori

编辑：Jack、Jaleel

The hot friend.tech three months ago now seems to have come to the end of the game and is facing a moment of crisis.

On August 10, 2023, friend.tech was officially launched, and on October 2, the friend.tech TVL exceeded $50 million, and on November 19, its TVL fell to $33.98 million, compared with $42.25 million on November 18, a decrease of 19.5% in the past two days. The crypto community has been crazy for nearly three months, and after nearly three months, it has ushered in a cold mood.

Although the friend.tech team has maintained a stable update frequency, the founder’s withdrawals, a large number of robot accounts have been rushed to make profits, and frequent changes in the points rules have made the community user experience friend.tech unsatisfactory.

A large number of user accounts have been misjudged as robots, friend.tech in the wave of withdrawals?

On November 17, friend.tech launched the Post Stream friend.tech feed, which allows users to control the ranking of posts through voting, and users with higher key prices are allocated more votes.

BlockBeats has observed that a large number of friend.tech live accounts have been misidentified as bots, resulting in these accounts not being allocated points this week. According to some users, if a Twitter account uses a registered default username or a combination of letters and numbers, the friend.tech will determine that type of account as a bot.

friend.tech said on November 18 that it had identified and removed 600,000 accounts identified as bots from the feed’s poll distribution, and that if a user’s account was incorrectly identified as a bot, they could contact friend.tech customer service and provide their Twitter username.

! [The boat of friendship is overturned?friend.tech cleaned up the bot account, and TVL fell by two percent] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/7949307367e5a4e7429c1a12c59c7dfc.jpg)

The user @friend.tech on X asks to unlock their account

On the data front, this past weekend, friend.tech total trading volume exceeded $10 million, a new high in more than half a month, but this could be an exit behavior. From November 18 to 19, friend.tech withdrew a total of 4,420 ETH, and its TVL fell by about 21%, the lowest level in nearly two months.

! [The boat of friendship is overturned?friend.tech cleaned up the bot account, and TVL fell by two percent] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/6de619179ad2b6be80f77a447f37be9a.jpg)

On November 20th, a large number of users were still selling their keys to flee friend.tech;

The act of identifying a real user as a bot has led to a lot of negative comments from the community about friend.tech. Crypto researcher @Loki_Zeng posted that all of friend.tech’s strategies are transactional and fee-oriented, which is not very user-friendly. "Let’s not talk about how many real accounts have been injured by mistake, do you think that some user behaviors should not be rewarded, so should the 5% handling fee charged be refunded?

And why don’t you care when the bot is crazy about making MEV income? The bot that hurts users but can generate income for you is not a bot? The points rule has been changed 800 times, and many people need to reconfigure it once it is changed, and the project party can earn a fee, which is really encouraging Holder?"

On top of that, this sell-off has also created a crisis of trust among the user base who hold keys. Christian, co-founder of crypto fund NDV and NFT whale, said on his social account that the holder’s act of selling keys without the homeowner’s knowledge was not friendly. Community user @defi_goddess also said that before opting out, you should send a private message to tell you about people who have recently used the “3,3” strategy, so that they can be sold first, saying that “this is basic morality and common sense”.

! [The boat of friendship is overturned?friend.tech cleaned up the bot account, and TVL fell by two percent] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/097d0eaa486b8e341fec6709bd3b95d5.jpg)

After the community sentiment fermented, friend.tech founder Racer posted Chinese “Family, who understands?”, and some platform users said that it seemed that the friend.tech team was very unprofessional.

! [The boat of friendship is overturned?friend.tech cleaned up the bot account, and TVL fell by two percent] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/ef9cc17761eeb63c89a26189cf8627dd.jpg)

On the FT, the friendship boat capsizes quickly

When friend.tech first launched, there were many articles analyzing its economic model in the crypto space, and the friend.tech team was constantly updating the product features, and user expectations for its airdrop and FOMO sentiment were getting higher. But as the market has cooled down recently, it seems like it’s time to take a step back and look at the other side of the friend.tech that was once overlooked.

The “3,3” strategy mentioned above is a classic Ponzi strategy, and in friend.tech, the goal of the “3,3” strategy is to climb the leaderboard and signal to other accounts that you are a holder and will not sell their keys, achieving a win-win effect.

Let’s say your Key is worth 0.1 ETH and you have a friend who is also worth 0.1 ETH. If you buy each other’s Keys, both of you will receive a 5% fee, and depending on the bond curve, your value will increase from 0.10 ETH to 0.12 ETH, which is actually about 0.02 ETH more than your value. Then you can repeat the same action with another friend, increasing your value again, repeat this action 100 times, and your key will become very valuable.

! [The boat of friendship is overturned?friend.tech cleaned up the bot account, and TVL fell by two percent] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/7584019962a0f9dda7d82a71b27963d2.jpg)

As a result, the proportion of Social in the SocialFi tab of friend.tech is getting smaller and smaller, and the attributes of Fi allow a group of traders and profitable bots to win higher value profits.

friend.tech itself is not a platform with strong binding of content production and social relationships, but only a financial product derived from Twitter, not a social product, which is also the key to friend.tech profiteering. friend.tech protocol does not require KOLs to produce content, users who come to buy keys do not come to consume content, and KOLs themselves do not seem to be responsible for users’ keys, and the seemingly weak social relationships are actually completely masked by the financial attributes of friend.tech.

Christian once mentioned his friend.tech trading strategy when participating in the “Wang Feng Ten Questions Live/Web Threesome” column, he will choose more stable users when building a portfolio, and the judging criteria are good character, pattern, and strength, “The secret is to choose a pattern when making friends, and do it yourself, don’t give up your reputation and accumulated things because of a little profit in front of you.” I said from the very beginning that I would not throw my key in advance, and I would definitely leave time for everyone to sell first. 」

! [The boat of friendship is overturned?friend.tech cleaned up the bot account, and TVL fell by two percent] (https://cdn-img.panewslab.com//panews/2022/11/21/images/7967aa7a2b76a16646a691f81d6f0e02.jpg)

friend.tech user Christian makes his attitude clear, photo: @Christianeth

But judging from the current friend.tech ecological landscape, this small ship of friendship is capsizing very quickly. More importantly, friend.tech embodies the endgame of a classic Ponzi game in which the prisoner trapped in a desperate situation must be the fastest one.

Success is also “3,3”, defeat is also “3,3”. The crazy rise in the number of users and prices of friend.tech in the early stage is due to its excellent economic model, but in the later stage, it cannot continue to “survive”. In addition to such an economic model, what other solutions can Web3 social play and where will it go?