friend.tech Flips The NFT Market
Friend.tech’s Resurgence
After looking dead in the water, friend.tech (FT) activity revived from the dead over the last week. Impressively, the friend.tech app saw more volume than the entire Ethereum NFT market.
While it’s still too early to tell, friend.tech surpassing the NFT market could be a “changing of the guard” moment that redefines the dominant route to retail in crypto. NFTs as we know them – PFPs, arts, etc. – are largely fleshed out. There is no more room to grow in the immediate to medium term.
Conversely, friend.tech still has ample room for growth. Inflows into the platform have essentially been up only since inception, despite a rough UX prone to lagging or outright dysfunction. That’s a compliment to the platform – at the very least, it’s clear people are willing to jump through hurdles – and steep fees – in order to access it. The importance of the fee component shouldn’t be understated. Requiring users to pay steep (10%) entry/exit taxes is much more costly to users than normal incentivized platform launches, which typically have zero entry/exit costs (i.e., Sybilling a new chain). It’s fair to say that friend.tech TVL, even if incentivized, may still be higher signal than other platforms due to these higher costs.
