TL;DR
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It feels like friend.tech is everywhere straight away..
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With friend.tech, you buy a maker’s shares (monetary value out), get the option to DM them, and sell for a profit if/when the shares increase in price (monetary value in).
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Bypassing app store terms and privacy agreements makes life easier for the developers of friend.tech, but those benefits don’t necessarily extend to the end user.
Full story
If you haven’t been on X (formerly Twitter) in the past week, maybe you could not have heard of friend.tech.
But it feels like it is everywhere straight away.
The basic concept behind the app is this:
You go to friend.tech → sign in/login with your X account → spend ‘shares’ of yourself in the app → anyone who buys your shares can send you a DM.
If the demand to “slide into your DMs” increases, the value of your friend.tech shares will follow.
It’s like subscribing to someone’s Patreon – but instead of paying for a subscription, you pay a one-time fee and get a “share” in return.
…stocks that have the potential to increase in value.
Making the monetary value exchange (potentially) a two-way street.
And that’s friend.tech’s hook:
With something like Patreon (or X’s “subscribe” feature), you buy a monthly creator subscription (monetary value off) and access private content.
With friend.tech, you buy a maker’s shares (monetary value out), get the option to DM them, and sell for a profit if/when the shares increase in price (monetary value in).
Here’s what makes friend.tech’s business model so genius:
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Every time a stock is bought/sold on the platform, friend.tech charges a 5% fee.
This structure netted the creator(s) a cool $1 million worth of Ethereum in just 24 hours last Friday.
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It takes the network effects of X into account. This means that new users don’t have to register with friend.tech, but can simply log in with their existing X account.
That’s slippery!
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Friend.tech is not an App Store based application. To install it, you need to go to the website, click the “Share” button and choose the “Add to Home Screen” option. (This adds a tile to your mobile home screen that links to the site).
The point of this cumbersome method is: Friend.tech doesn’t have to accept any Apple/Android App Store terms and conditions or share its revenue with third party platforms/companies.
Now, this is where it gets cloudy…
Bypassing app store terms and privacy agreements makes life easier for the developers of friend.tech, but those benefits don’t necessarily extend to the end user.
In fact, it could put them in danger.
When you click on the link to the friend.tech privacy policy on the friend.tech home page, you get a pop-up that says “Coming soon!”
Not good.
We personally await this one.
But! If your curiosity gets the better of you, here are some best practices from Ignas, a crypto nerd we found on X: