Have you ever had that feeling when you happen to scroll past the same meme for the tenth time on Twitter?

“This is a big waste of time, I should go to sleep!” I thought to myself as I scrolled through the crazy plane woman once again. As she faded back into the all-powerful algorithm, ready to hunt for her next victim, the next Tweet (yes, I know, it’s X now) drew my attention:

Source: friend.tech on X

Coupled with an explosion of Crypto Twitter shenanigans I had scrolled through during the day, the official announcement finally pushed me to type in friend.tech on my Safari browser where I saw this:

My first reaction was that this is a scam. I have never used a crypto application that does this. Luckily, I have zero crypto accessible from my phone so in the worst-case scenario I don’t lose anything.

I followed the instructions and opened the app. It has a very basic login page that reminded me a lot of the pre-Elon Twitter. The blue bunny ears especially feel like a salute to the beloved blue bird.

Instead of creating an account, the cautious me clicked on the privacy policy:

Coming soon!? My confidence for this new app plummeted but I decided to go through with it anyway. After logging in with a choice of phone number, Google account, or Apple ID, you are asked to log in to your Twitter (X) account and grant the app full access, even to post for you. I seriously almost closed the app right then, but I figured I could just delete the app and revoke all permissions on Twitter if it went rogue.

After login, friend.tech creates an Ethereum wallet for you — it’s done automatically with the help of Privy — and instructs you to send some ETH to it from Coinbase’s new Base L2. Perfect! I have been wanting to find out what the fuss is all about on Base. Once you have ETH, the app asks you to obtain a share in yourself, the genesis share. After I bought my first share, three bots immediately sniped me for a share each. The fifth buyer sent me a message. His name is Kakumei:

I bought a couple more of my shares, and decided to explore a little. The first thing I saw was the leaderboard. Coming from a trading background, I immediately bought ZhuSu because he was worshipped like a god before 3AC blew up.

The infamous leaderboard that signals status and influence to all friends on friend.tech

In his chat room, I felt very special because I was one of only 40 people who had direct access to ZhuSu. That’s the power of friend.tech. What can I do with this resource that I just dropped 1.2 ETH on? I decided to ask him to buy my share as proof of friendship. To this day he has not replied to me.

By this point I had figured out that shares are not actually tradable tokens. Instead, they are simply data points kept by the smart contract that buys and sells shares at a predefined rate where price = share number² / 16000 * 1 ETH. This is genius because it saves all the work needed to launch liquidity pools and incentivize users to provide liquidity as we would see in a normal DEX.

Feeling more confident, I decided to try a new “proof-of-friendship” strategy with Racer, the founder of friend.tech. Racer was surprisingly cool and bought my share, but the app wouldn’t refresh so I decided to go to sleep.

It was 4:23 a.m. on August 11 and I slept for ~4 hours that night.

The next morning, when I was looking at the Explore tab for new activity, David Hoffman signed up. As a viewer of every Bankless episode since 2020, I immediately sniped his share and chatted him up. David was super down to earth and bought my share. I tried the proof-of-friendship strategy a couple more times with people I respected but no one else batted an eye.

But now that I had two cool people in my chat, I could use that to show how cool and exclusive my chat is! I knew I had to have a catchy slogan and I didn’t want to say the most expensive share (just in case the SEC sued me). Eventually, I came up with the idea of hosting the most valuable group chat on friend.tech. My logic was that if the most valuable people are in my chat, then I must be the most valuable group chat. So I made my first declaration:

Building the Most Valuable Room on Friend.tech

No one bought my idea at this point so for the rest of the evening I bought cheap new accounts, chatted them up about how I have famous people in my chat and invited them to buy me. This strategy brought my first 10 holders. I went to sleep ready for the next day.

When I woke up on August 12, a miracle happened. The friendtech Twitter account posted an update with me in their picture! I am pretty sure Racer just took a screenshot randomly on his phone, but since he holds me, and Skullcap had just bought me one hour prior, somehow I made the screenshot.

I was ecstatic. I immediately understood how many people would see this and how great of an opportunity it would be for me to drive interest in my shares. I knew I just needed to grind as much as possible. I started to create regular Twitter content and continued to snipe any reputable people who joined the app. As soon as I bought them, I chatted them up almost fanatically to convince them to join “the most valuable group chat” on friend.tech.

My best performing thread is that I screenshotted the price chart of all top 50 accounts on leaderboard and tagged them on Twitter one by one. The whole thread generated ~20k impressions.

Unfortunately, people were too interested in sniping big Twitter accounts, as it meant instantly doubling your money and no one was interested in me. My holdings rapidly went up compared to my holders (I think I held around 40 accounts), but that’s not the direction I needed.

Friend.tech Is Also About Access

I was chatting up so many reputable people in the industry that eventually a light bulb lit up in my head. It went like this:

I have access to Racer, who the market had priced as the second most valuable share. My holders have access to me. Hence they could ask Racer any questions through me and I will stream Racer’s answers back to my holders in real time. I can do this for every single one of my holdings. If we extend this logic to everyone on this app, then I am the proxy share of every single share on friend.tech. So I published my thesis:

From that point on, I was all in. No single man can offer more alpha than 100 men. If he does, I will gladly buy him and you get the other 100 for free.

I funded my account with fresh ETH and started buying even more accounts. First I had to get Cobie since he was literally the most valuable share. Then I went down the Top 50 leaderboard to buy those I knew and respected. After that, my streaming career began.

Get Friendly With the Unfriendly Tech

Since August 13, I have streamed 16 hours a day and quickly iterated with micro-inventions. My day involves being hyperactive in 100 chats, identifying alpha, reformatting it in a quickly digestible way, sending it in my chat — on repeat for 16 hours, and I mean all of them.

In a very ironic way, friend.tech’s severe lack of features forced all creators to compete on text-based content, as that’s all that platform currently allows. There are no funny pictures or viral videos to hide the meaningless void that spans today’s social media. Message too long? No one reads them. Too short? Not enough alpha. If you are not active and producing content that is so desirable people are willing to endure a UI stuck in the 2000s, your holders will sell you. In addition to perfecting content, I learned to make little improvements like:

I emoji-code every message and give a concise title to reduce my holders’ cognitive load.
I balance out text/emoji to reduce my holders’ visual fatigue.
I respond to all holders instantly during every waking hour to show them how much I care about them. I am their biggest hype man.
As soon as I see a message in any chat, I immediately respond to deepen the conversation and timestamp it.
I greet every new holder in a unique way that hasn’t been done before — 46 and counting.
I give out a lot of my personality through words so that my holders feel the social element as much as possible.

Yes, I pulled an all-nighter to write this article because I need to stream during the day.

On August 13, I became the first full-time content creator on friend.tech, streaming from 8 a.m. to midnight. In total I have owned and chatted with well over 200 accounts. Soon after, my hard work started to pay off. My holders loved my content. The next day, we hit #36 on the top leaderboard. On August 15 we hit #15. Now we are #__ with __ holders and well over 100 holdings, with current coverage in more than 50% of Top 50 and about 80 more in smaller but highly respected accounts.

My first human holder Kakumei sold his share on August 16 after 4 days and 23 hours. He pocketed a well-deserved 0.27125 ETH in profit. I am forever grateful for his early support.

Friend.tech Is the Twitter of the Future

Friend.tech is a weird place. Some do AMAs every day, others play video games with their holders, and there are a few who only talk about feet pics. Nonetheless, every single creator on friend.tech is trying out new and creative ways to engage with their holders in a deeper and more meaningful way.

Remember that crazy plane woman? I admit, I am guilty. Before friend.tech I was one of many “reply guys” trying to get as many impressions as possible, because that was the only way to monetize on Twitter. But what’s the result? We lost the Twitter that we loved, where we could scroll for hours at a time because all the alpha was there.

The Twitter we love is probably still there, just invisible to us, hidden and overshadowed by the annoying plane woman, CCTV idiots, and pranks gone wrong, incentivized by Elon’s obsession over MORE impressions. Friend.tech allows any creator to monetize from day one, even when they literally have ZERO fans, as long as they are obsessed with their content and work harder than anyone else.

No content creator has to sell bullshit merch anymore. No content creator has to accept bullshit ads and sponsors who are only interested in monetizing their fan base. Every content creator can just obsess over the content they loved to create in the first place and your fans will literally fight for you.

If I did it in five days, you can do it too. Let’s save Twitter together, starting with obsessing on content.

Author Bio

0xCaptainLevi is running the most valuable chat on friend.tech

Editor Bios

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about crypto and NFTs, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

Hiro Kennelly is a writer, editor, and coordinator at BanklessDAO, an Associate at Bankless Consulting, and a DAOpunk.

Designer Bio

trewkat is a writer, editor, and designer at BanklessDAO. She’s interested in learning about crypto and NFTs, with a particular focus on how best to communicate this knowledge to others.

BanklessDAO is an education and media engine dedicated to helping individuals achieve financial independence.

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