Friend.tech Founders Say Viral Crypto App Is Surprising Them Too: 'We Want to Catch Our Breath'

Friend.tech, the new decentralized social media platform from the makers of Stealcam, has already, in its mere two weeks of existence, seen an extraordinary run. Now its developers tell Decrypt that they’re planning various fixes and features—after they catch their breath.

The app, which is built on Coinbase’s Base scaling network for Ethereum and lets users buy and sell “keys” (originally, “shares”) in their favorite Twitter accounts, has generated a whopping $2.88 million in protocol fees. In that metric, it has outpaced every single on-chain protocol globally over the last 24 hours besides Ethereum and Lido, according to DefiLlama.

In the wake of the app’s upstart success, Twitter has buzzed with speculation regarding Friend.tech’s future, its staying power, and potential legal issues the site may face related to securities regulations.

But the platform’s pseudonymous founders don’t currently appear to be concerned with those larger, more existential issues. They’re just happy the site isn’t crashing.

“We initially shared the app to start load testing and didn’t expect it to go viral,” Friend.tech co-founder Racer told Decrypt. “So we’re doing a bit of catch-up.”

When Friend.tech went live with an invite-only beta on August 10, the application hit server capacity that same day. At that point, unique buyers and sellers on Friend.tech hovered around 10,000; at writing, the site has now seen over 115,000 unique users engage with its tokenized mechanics, according to blockchain data compiled by Dune.

Thus, Racer and their fellow pseudonymous co-founder Shrimp say they’ve been spending their days of late preoccupied with scaling Friend.tech’s infrastructure, fixing bugs, and setting up basic policies and guardrails for the site. 

Loftier considerations about how to sustain Friend.tech’s growth, or insulate it from mounting legal concerns, will have to wait until the site is stabilized.

“We’re excited about a lot of things we could do after that,” Racer said. 

But the two-person team behind crypto’s latest financialized frenzy may also want to take a breather, after firing on all cylinders to keep Friend.tech afloat. 

“We want to catch our breath a bit,” Racer admitted.