In August 2023, friend.tech burst onto the scene, quickly capturing the attention of users with its innovative concept of selling tokens, referred to as “keys,” linked to users’ Twitter accounts via Ethereum (ETH) on the Base Network. These keys offer unique privileges to users with influence, often referred to as Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs).
Despite being a newcomer, friend.tech has emerged as a leading revenue generator on Base and ranks second in the entire cryptocurrency industry, according to DeFiLlama data. At its current pace, friend.tech’s estimated annual revenue stands at a staggering $180 million. To date, this social network has generated nearly $40 million in fee revenue from its users. Half of the total fees are allocated to the project team as revenue, while the remaining half is distributed to users with keys involved in transactions.
Under the pressure of applications positioning themselves as competitors on different chains (such as Stars Arena on Avalanche or PostTech on Arbitrum), friend.tech continues to dominate daily trading volume in the broader SocialFi segment. However, the number of new users has significantly decreased since the end of September, as previously reported by Coin68.
In addition to the aforementioned revenue, friend.tech’s anonymous founder, ‘0xRacer,’ has also collected over $440,000 from the platform, as reported by on-chain data compiled on Dune.
The key price for the founder of friend.tech is currently at 4.16 ETH | Source: Dune Analytics.
However, despite these achievements, friend.tech has recently faced several security challenges. On October 3rd, the platform fell victim to two SIM swap attacks. In these attacks, hackers swapped the SIM card, gained access to accounts, and made off with 22 ETH, equivalent to $35,000.
Moving to October 4th, four more users fell prey to similar attacks, resulting in hackers pocketing an additional 234 ETH. Subsequently, the project introduced an option for users to switch from phone numbers to email for added security. These incidents harken back to the data breach that exposed the information of 101,000 users in early August.
Read more:
- Friend.Tech Protocol’s Revenue Soars Past 10,000 ETH Milestone
- Friend Tech’s Remarkable Surge: Over 80,000 ETH Inflows And Skyrocketing Transactions