friend.tech Trading Volumes Cross $220M

friend.tech, an application that offers token-gated chat rooms, appears to be catching a second wind.

After an inital wave of hype was followed by a period of relatively low activity, friend.tech has nearly reached $1M in daily revenue, an all-time high, according to Token Terminal.

The revenue comes from a 5% fee charged on all trades of friend.tech keys. Rooms’ hosts also take a 5% cut from trades.

Joe Coll, an angel investor and former venture capitalist, thinks the team behind friend.tech has made some key design choices that have driven the app’s success.

“The biggest takeaway people should have about friend.tech is how bringing together the right confluence of infrastructure can be a game changer for consumer adoption of crypto apps,” he told The Defiant.

Coll listed friend.tech’s use of Twitter’s social graph, its simplification of the crypto wallet experience, and choice to deploy as a progressive web app, which functions similarly to a mobile app but bypasses app stores, as key choices in infrastructure.

While still only a month old, friend.tech’s second wave of momentum has made it difficult to dismiss as a flash in the pan — while many are no doubt drawn to its speculative aspects, there’s arguably unique value to be found in token-gated chatrooms.

Rewarding Niche Content

The app may favor the kinds of content which aren’t rewarded elsewhere — accounts like DtDcTr, relatively unknown on X, have attracted 70 keyholders, which means access to the chatroom costs nearly 0.52 ETH, or well over $800.

Another user who goes by Gareth shared how they were able to leverage friend.tech to amplify their reach on social media.

Vast Array Of Tools

friend.tech continues to attract developers to build tooling for the application – following the advent of tools to track top accounts, convert keys into fungible tokens, and others, Manifold, an investment firm, deployed a new smart contract which allows users to buy up their own keys immediately upon creating an account.

This is useful because traders have been running bots to snipe influencers’ keys as soon as they join the platform. This prevented users with large followings from effectively betting on themselves early by buying their own keys.

Yat Siu, the co-founder of the crypto-focused development and venture studio, Animoca Brands, used Manifold’s tool earlier today. So did pseudonymous influencer MEVCollector, who now holds 35 of their own keys.

Airdrop Hype

To be sure, it’s too early to call friend.tech the future of social media — the project is receiving a boost from a points program that most assume will translate into a token airdrop.

Regardless, friend.tech has achieved an enviable position among crypto apps — for the second time in less than a month, the app only lags Ethereum by fees, according to DeFi Llama.