An End to The Friendzy?

As crypto’s first viral social application on L2, friend.tech has seen a huge surge in interest and activity. The frenzy drove transaction count on Base to 1.4 million on August 21, 2023, higher than Ethereum’s individually or the combined counts of OP Mainnet and Arbitrum One.

However, as quickly as it rose, activity on friend.tech has cooled off over the past few days. The number of traders and volumes are down 40% and 80% off their peak. Users’ gripes have been high fees on trades, slow load times, and a steep pricing curve. The team is working on potential solutions and will continue to iterate in prod, but in the meanwhile, the impact it has had on Base has been real.

It has helped solve a cold-start problem faced by new platforms by driving a huge burst in users and activity. Base unique addresses increased by 315 thousand or 34% over the past 5 days. With capital and wallets already set up on Base, these users are likely to continue to experiment with other platform launches. Major DeFi products that have already launched on Base include Uniswap, Aave, 1inch, and SushiSwap. This increase in Base users may act as an incentive for more protocols to do the same.