Coinbase’s Layer 2 platform Base’s decentralized social media platform Friend.Tech is facing a significant slowdown after initially attracting considerable attention. Within four months of its launch, the interest in the social media platform has greatly diminished, and the downward trend continues.
Dragonfly Founder Labels Friend.Tech a Poor DeFi Project
Dragonfly’s founder Haseeb recently expressed his astonishment at the rapid transformation of Friend.tech into a deserted project in just four months. The prevailing opinion is that the collapse of Friend.tech’s yield curve played a significant role in its downfall.
Responding to this observation, Ethereum‘s co-founder Vitalik Buterin reiterated his often-expressed view that “A bad GameFi project replaced fun with financial speculation. Blockchain games should be as enjoyable as games.”
It is worth recalling that at the peak of interest in Friend.Tech, the total value locked (TVL) in the protocol had exceeded $50 million. According to DeFiLlama’s data, the platform’s TVL has been declining since then, with a 50% drop over the last four months to $26.46 million.
Buterin Remains Hopeful for Farcaster and WRT Lens
On the other hand, Buterin continues to place his trust in certain decentralized social applications like Farcaster and WRT Lens for the future of the crypto social world, expecting a bullish outcome. Farcaster is known for being a decentralized social application protocol that allows users to control their data while also providing developers with the opportunity to create applications on the network without oversight. Interestingly, Buterin’s comments came alongside a more than 400% increase in daily active users on the Farcaster protocol’s social media application Warpcast, following the introduction of frames.
The frames on Warpcast now enable users to mint NFTs, transact, claim tokens, read external blog posts, and participate in polls, all within the app, eliminating the need for transaction signing or navigating elsewhere. This development was launched on January 27th.
Moreover, the Farcaster network saw a significant increase in daily active users from around 5,000 on January 28th to over 24,700 by February 3rd, according to data from Dune Analytics. Furthermore, the daily new “broadcast” volume skyrocketed to over 2 million by February 3rd, a remarkable increase of around 1,000% from the approximately 200,000 recorded the previous week.
Similar to Farcaster, WRT Lens is also a decentralized, composable social graph. The protocol stands out by empowering developers to create next-generation social media applications.