I hope you are all well and having excellent day, welcome to CryptoGod-1’s blog on all things crypto. In this post I will be looking at the success of Friend.tech and how its developers have amassed a fortune since its debut.
Friend.tech
Since its launch in August 2023, the development team behind friend.tech has managed to amass almost $20 million in revenue. This comes from data according to DeFiLlama, which states that friend.tech currently holds the position of the largest revenue-generating application on Base. It is also the second-largest which viewing the entire crypto sector. Going off its current pace, the platform is projected to generate an annualized revenue of $180 million.
To date a total of approximately $40 million in user fees has been generated, while these fees are generated from taxing around 10% of the trading volume of social tokens. From these fees, half is allocated as revenue for the project's team, while the other half is distributed among users whose keys are traded. While the figure being touted are very impressive in terms of revenue generated for the platform, the pseudonymous founder of friend.tech, known as '0xRacer,' has managed to earn over $440,000 from the platform.
The platform serves users by enabling them to link their Twitter accounts and this facilitates the buying and selling of influencer profile tokens. These tokens are known as keys, and make use of ETH on the Coinbase-backed Layer 2 network, Base. These keys allow users privileged communication access to influencers, along with creating a unique social interaction experience.
While a number of clone apps have emerged in the space, friend.tech continues to dominate the SocialFi niche in terms of daily volume. It should be noted however that the number of unique users has been in decline since late September. In early October a hacker managed to steal approximately $385,000 worth of digital assets in 24 hours by performing SIM-swapping attacks on friend.tech users. The worked out to around 234ETH, according to blockchain sleuth ZachXBT, and it was from attacks on four different users. X (formerly Twitter) user @sumfattytuna revealed that they were one of the victims of the most recent chain of SIM-swap attacks.
A company dedicated to developing tools for the industry known as Manifold Trading has noted that $20 million out of friend.tech's total locked value of $50 million is at risk. In a recent post on X, they noted:
"If you assume 1/3 of FriendTech accounts are connected to phone numbers, that's $20M at risk from sim-swaps."
They also went on to note that the current setup of friend.tech allows for a rogue developer to reconstruct private keys via Shamir-Secret-Sharing shares that they can recover from user data in their database. To mitigate this risk they recommend that friend.tech enhances its account security protocols by implementing two-factor authentication (2FA).
Have a great day.
CryptoGod-1.
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