Friend.tech without innovation has brought a product lesson to the cryptocurrency circle.

Friend.tech brought a product lesson to the cryptocurrency circle without innovation.

Wang Huiwen, co-founder of Meituan, mentioned in his product class that humans love innovation at an abstract level and fear innovation at a concrete level.

Original author: 0x26

How long has it been since you last saw a dApp on the screen? Whether it is a so-called ponzi or not, friend.tech has achieved it.

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The average weekly usage time of friend.tech is 1 hour, but users mostly use the web version.

Although some people jokingly say that friend.tech’s greatest strength is their “ability to mobilize top KOLs, which is irreplaceable.” Top KOLs and LianGuairadigm, the “golden signboard” of the encryption industry, have indeed become the first and second rounds of the hot engine for ft, but they cannot explain the recent development trend of ft.

From the data perspective, the development of ft is not achieved overnight. The calm period from the end of August to the beginning of September not only kept ft away from the public’s attention, but also further reduced the number of speculative clients.

ft’s TVL and new users, data source: DefiLlama

The continuous update and iteration of the product laid the foundation for the relatively healthy growth of ft recently. This round of ft expansion has also attracted more DeFi and NFT players. There is even a slight out-of-the-box effect, with some YouTubers, OnlyFans operators, authors, internet industry practitioners, and VCs joining ft. Even on September 22nd, when ft reduced the points rewards for self-purchasing users, it could not hide the market’s enthusiasm, and ft’s Total Value Locked (TVL) still hit a new high.

On September 28, 2023, 49 days after the launch of ft, the team’s transaction fee income was approximately $15 million.

From the perspective of social products, ft’s data is also impressive. According to the official data released by ft, the next-day retention rate of ft exceeds 75%, and the weekly retention rate exceeds 50%, indicating strong product stickiness and users continuing to use this product in large numbers. At the same time, active key holders use FriendsTech for an average of more than 30 minutes per day.

Although some netizens joked that 27 minutes are spent on refreshing the page, it seems that ft has recently strengthened its server performance, resulting in a much-improved user experience compared to when it was first launched.

However, for the long-term development of the entire industry, the focus is not solely on friend.tech itself, including its ponzi design and wealth effect. The true significance of ft is to tell the market that with existing technology, we can build impressive products. Even though the product is still in its early stages, through creativity and mature operating methods, it can demonstrate the potential to become a consumer-level product.

Even if the ft is not successful, it uses PWA technology that can bypass Apple’s tax, a login method that does not require a mnemonic phrase, an L2 low-fee interaction method, and an optimized transaction matching form. It can tell the founders and developers who are surging that there are still many possibilities even if they don’t create new public chains and zk.

And none of the mentioned technologies above are original to ft. As Henry Ford said, “I didn’t invent anything new, I just assembled the inventions of others over the centuries into a car.”

This article is not intended to discuss whether ft is the Uniswap moment for social. Instead, it will analyze the protocols and infrastructure used by ft starting from the first step of the login interface, based on the social platform and known information provided by friend.tech. If there are any protocols that have not been mentioned, readers are welcome to inform us so that they can be supplemented.

Stack 1: PWA

Not only does ft initially strongly bind with Twitter, but it also strongly binds with an old technology – PWA (Progressive Web App).

Although it is called an old technology, it has not even been a year since it meets the requirements of ft push. According to Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster, Safari’s support for PWA has been enhanced in version 16.4 (released in 2023), which allows users to receive ft message pushes more stably.

In general, PWA is still a web application, but by providing a standard framework on the mobile side, it can achieve a user experience similar to native applications in web applications. This includes message pushes, background loading, offline usage, native application interfaces (similar UI and UX to native applications), and desktop icons.

PWA is no longer new to many developers. In foreign countries, Twitter in the era of Jack Dorsey has long supported PWA, and many platforms in China, such as Weibo and Minority, also support PWA and provide excellent user experience. Even in the encryption community, projects such as Coinbase, Orca, and LianGuaincakeSwap support PWA applications. Like ft, many DEXs also support jumping to mobile local wallets such as MetaMask to complete authorization.

Protocols and websites that support PWA

For the encryption community, PWA technology also means bypassing the supervision of various app store software and the 30% revenue sharing of the Apple Store. I don’t know if you still remember, a few years ago, Epic and Apple had a huge dispute over the “Apple tax” issue in Fortnite. While Apple and several game giants were arguing about the “Apple tax” issue, Amazon’s cloud gaming service Luna cleverly chose the PWA mode to bypass Apple Store’s supervision.

Through communication with some developers, it is learned that even without considering the Apple tax, the comprehensive cost of launching on PWA is lower than that of the app store, and the maintenance cost for the same user scale is also lower. After ft uses PWA technology and successfully attracts enough attention, PWA may become an important implementation path for products in the encryption industry.

Source: Delphi Digital

At the same time, PWA technology has also been a major driving factor for the rapid iteration and continuous addition of new features after the launch of ft.

Stack 2: Privy – Embedded Wallet

After “downloading”, ft did not choose the traditional way of encrypting the familiar users (downloading wallets, saving mnemonic phrases, switching networks, connecting wallets to applications, etc.), but instead created a new self-hosted wallet for users through Google accounts and Apple IDs, avoiding the experience of saving mnemonic phrases or private keys, simplifying the entry process, and weakening the encryption attributes of the product.

Here, ft chooses the embedded wallet mode of Privy, achieving the same experience as many mainstream login methods in China and abroad – logging in with mainstream platform accounts such as WeChat, QQ, or Google.

If you think this embedded implementation method is optional, then you can imagine another version of ft: download the MetaMask wallet, connect it to MetaMask, and then connect Twitter to that account. Every time you want to buy a key from someone else on the application, you have to jump to MetaMask, sign the transaction, and then return to the application. Under this user experience, ft is basically excluded from all traditional users.

Using an embedded wallet is not a betrayal of encryption. Privy CEO Henri Stern said that in fact, it is just a very good alternative for certain application experiences – it can put traditional Internet users who log in with their email accounts on the same starting line as native encryption users.

According to Privy’s introduction, the embedded wallet uses MPC technology and is implemented through Shamir Secret Sharing: the wallet’s security data is divided into N parts, and M parts can be used to restore it. Currently, Privy distributes the wallet security data into three parts, and any two parts can access the account.

The ultimate result of the embedded wallet is that Privy cannot reconstruct the mnemonic phrase or access the user’s private key alone, and the user can access their private key at any time without going through Privy. That is, friend.tech and Privy cannot access the user’s private key, but the user can have full access to the encrypted cryptocurrency wallet.

However, the founder of DefiLlama, 0xngmi, also stated on social media that “currently friend.tech stores user keys in the front end, making it vulnerable to attacks.” However, Privy’s embedded wallet was launched in March 2023 and is still updating its products. For example, it recently added a password recovery function. In the near future, the currently criticized new address issue may be resolved, and even hardware wallets may be integrated with ft in some way. Lido will continue to pay attention to the technical updates of embedded wallets and consumer-grade encryption products.

Stack 3: RaaS-Base, (Rollup as a Service)

After completing account registration and login, and binding Twitter, inject Ethereum into the newly created wallet (including options for the main network and Base), and transfer Ethereum in the Base chain of the account. Ethereum is the only and universal currency for ft. Thanks to all transactions occurring on the Base chain, the transaction fees for ft users are extremely low.

The popularity of Base’s launch indicates that the market is gradually shifting the narrative from “one-click issuance of tokens” to “one-click issuance of chains” (RaaS, Rollup as a Service). Base, built on the OP Stack, even surpasses Optimism in some aspects. Based on the narratives of major institutions and media outlets, OP Stack offers shared security, powerful functionality, low costs, and open source characteristics. Using RaaS can greatly avoid the prevalent issue of reinventing the wheel in the cryptocurrency industry and reduce fragmentation.

Recently, Base has surpassed Optimism in terms of user numbers and transaction volume. Data source: DefiLlama

In the future, with the launch of more RaaS protocols such as Conduit, Caldera, and Eclipse, deploying L2 solutions with one click may become commonplace.

Stack 4: bonding curve

The founder of ft, Racer, seems to have a strong interest in DeFi. In her previous image-sharing product, Stealcam, she introduced an automatic trading matching mechanism. The price of opening the rights to Stealcam increases by 10% plus 0.001 ETH at a certain frequency, while also paying a certain protocol income to the creators.

In ft, Racer directly builds all transactions on a bonding curve, without the need for any external LP (Liquidity Provider). Participants in each Room naturally form a medium of exchange. The prices of each Room and Key are rational and traceable. The simple and transparent calculation method avoids complex calculations and transaction vulnerabilities.

The bonding curve for ft keys

Of course, many users are discussing the phenomenon of the key price being too high under the current bonding curve, which may affect the willingness of potential participants to pay. This is also a problem that the ft team needs to face and solve.

Stack 5: Others

Even though everything in ft comes from smart contracts on the Base chain (users can interact with ft through other front-ends), it seems that everyone considers ft to be a Web 2.5 product.

For example, PWA itself is a technology that relies on centralized servers. The chat content within each Room in ft is completely centralized and is not encrypted or stored on decentralized storage protocols such as IPFS or Ar. Additionally, user addresses and Twitter user information are strongly tied together, which some users see as a kind of vampire attack or parasitism.

However, the series of derivative activities triggered by ft are all based on smart contracts. For example, the previous incident of memory pool leakage allowed robots to purchase a large number of new user keys within the same block. And now, various robots and derivatives based on web or TG bot terminals have been launched. Even future behaviors and activities such as voting and NFT distribution based on keys will all be based on on-chain data.

In the process of shifting the focus towards mass adoption and consumer applications, controversies about decentralization in the crypto world are inevitable. However, as mentioned in an article by Privy, Web3 today is user-oriented, rather than expert-oriented.

Inspiration

To some extent, friend.tech does resemble traditional internet products, as reflected in the frequency of product and rule adjustments: fast iteration and low cost.

Product Iteration

The product iteration speed of ft undoubtedly exceeds the average standard of the crypto industry. This can be most directly felt from the bottom navigation bar of the product. The initial version of ft only had three options: home, explore, and airdrop. Now it has five options: home, following list, chat, explore, and airdrop. In short, ft is more like a product now.

Comparison of ft features: the upper part is the initial version, and the lower part is the version after multiple iterations.

ft has also organized the updates announced by ft, presenting the updates and frequency of the product in a more intuitive way. If it is true, as rumored in the community, that the ft team only has three members, the frequency of updates for this product is enough to surprise many users in the crypto community.

Precise Operations

Since airdrop hunters became the main users of the crypto industry, the game between project parties and witch attacks has become a focus. However, the black box and high-frequency adjustments of ft’s scoring rules do not seem to have triggered a widespread centralized discussion in the community. Many users even expressed their approval.

Fast iteration is difficult to achieve in code is law smart contracts, but ft’s contract only fixes the transaction layer, while the scoring and product functions belong to the data layer. How to adjust the variable rules in order to attract more users, reduce vulnerabilities, and stimulate user activity, thereby promoting the growth of high-quality smart contract data, is undoubtedly a good way through centralized adjustments.

Just like well-known traditional internet products among users, finding the right PMF (Product Market Fit) requires a lot of internal data analysis, research, and AB experiments.

The ft team also has a well-planned market operation strategy. For example, in the product launch, the first wave of excitement comes from a wide-scale cold start under the promotion of KOLs, which influences the majority of crypto users. When the momentum of the product’s rise weakens, ft’s announcement of the LianGuairadigm financing adds endorsement to its product and attracts more short sellers and interested institutions. At the same time, the ft team has made dynamic adjustments to the product, not only catering to the (3,3) strategy of the ft community and providing assistance for mutual purchases but also significantly reducing the points gained from self-purchases.

In his product class, Wang Huiwen, co-founder of Meituan, mentioned that at an abstract level, humans love innovation, but at a concrete level, humans fear innovation.

In fact, most successful cases today are not the first products in their industry. We hope that the emergence of friend.tech can inspire more new ideas and creative products in the industry, and look forward to the emergence of more encrypted consumer-level applications.

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