Social marketplace Friendzone starts operating on the Polygon PoS blockchain today and plans to later expand to Polygon zkEVM, another blockchain from Polygon developers.
“Friendzone is a new social platform with two main parts,” CEO and co-founder Kevin Lu said in a message to CoinDesk. “The surface part is easy to use and lets people manage their social connections and activities. The deeper part, called LayerSocial, allows developers to create new apps that use the platform’s social connections and data.”
The number of registered users increased by more than 600% from December to January, and in January alone there were 10,000 completed user missions or activities. The pre-launch progressive web app was initially only open to Friendzone’s network of partners, investors and in-person event attendees for early registrations. It claims to have seen more than 3,000 registrations.
The introduction of the app, which uses real-time adaptive pricing and reward distribution to build online communities, follows the launch of Friend.Tech in August. That attracted huge hype and volumes to enable influencers to monetize networking using a chatroom-like service. The hype faded in the following months, along with the user base down more than 90% from its lifetime peak. Stars Arena was also introduced with huge hype, but later disappeared.
Before launch, Friendzone was not based on a blockchain. “Our pre-launch app is off-chain and is designed to enable early registrations and social engagement,” said Lu.
Friendzone was built by early team members from Band Protocol, Synthetix and Koinly.
“Friendzone is a place where people can connect and use different apps, and this year it will collaborate with other apps to grow its own app ecosystem,” Lu added.