A glimpse of the future
You have to squint hard, but it's there
Last night, I had 4 hours of sleep.
Because I was up until 2am having fun with my Internet friends trading on Friends Tech.
The experience is terrible—it's buggy, barely functional, and at times, you have to quickly turn WiFi on and off to make the spinning wheel of death subside.
You are competing against bots and FOMO-driven, sleep-deprived degens, all fighting to ape the latest influencer close to launch to make a profit.
It’s a paywalled, broken amalgamation of OnlyFans without the images, Twitter without the feed, and Patreon without the writers.
And it’s the most fun I’ve had in Crypto since the dawn of NFTs.
If I squint hard enough, I can see a glimpse of the future.
Through the darkness of the bear market, there is light.
It’s way off in the distance but it exists, and that gives me comfort that we’re not all wasting our time and this industry does actually have a chance of progression and talented people are building apps that aren’t just the 50,000th rehashed version of Uniswap on some new chain that's an exact clone of the clone of the fifteenth cloned chain.
I see the potential here in two key areas:
Wallet & Key Abstraction
SocialFi
Account Abstraction:
I know I said above that using Friends Tech is like trying to browse Google on a toaster, but the actual trading & joining process is LIGHTYEARS ahead of apps I’ve used in the past in Crypto.
The same is also true of Unibot X which I tested out earlier this week.
For a new user not needing to download Metamask, remember and write down 12 words, and learn what gas and slippage are is AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE better than the current process.
I’ve done hundreds, maybe thousands of DEX trades in my time in Crypto and after 3 hours using Unibot, it feels like someone's cut off my legs and asked me to run a marathon when I return to the old system.
Simply put, we are FINALLY starting to see an era where good user experience is being prioritised, where you don’t need to give up an entire weekend to onboard into Crypto. Only for your dog to eat your seed phrase and you to lose all your money.
Of course, people will complain that it's not secure, you might get hacked, it's not as safe as a hardware wallet and of course these things are all true.
But for the average user just wanting to deposit $15 to try out the new hot app, do they really need the same level of security assumptions and resulting terrible user experience as someone storing their entire net worth in a plastic USB stick they hide under their bed?
NO.
SocialFi:
I don’t want to get goaded into writing about the moral and ethical dilemma of trading shares in human beings right now because it's a super nuanced, difficult and complicated topic and I need to put a lot of thought into it.
But SocialFi as an idea is something that's long been talked about and tried many times. This is the first time it's seen broad levels of success amongst the CT community.
After spending the past week or so using it, I’ve had a brilliant time, and so has everyone I’ve spoken to who has tried it.
Sure this might just be the cool new thing syndrome appearing, and the enthusiasm for it will die down, but the idea itself might just have product market fit.
It’s also exactly what we need to bring new users into the Crypto space.
New novel apps and ideas that can garner attention and if iterated and developed correctly can offer real tangible genuine benefits to users of other ecosystems.
Speak to anyone who creates any kind of content that can be viewed as risky, whether that's OnlyFans creators, or someone who has non-mainstream political views. Being censored is an issue. Being unbanked is an even bigger issue.
These are real things that Crypto can actually offer a benefit for.
The issue has always been historically that despite it being a great solution to these problems, the user experience has been so bad that no one ever tried it out.
Here however I’ve already started to spot eSports professionals and OnlyFans creators join Friend.Tech, so clearly the message is spreading and the idea is working.
Maybe it won’t be Friend.tech that does it, but I do honestly think something of this genre could be the app that onboards the most new users since NFTs.
And if you close your eyes and ignore the pessimistic thoughts it’s just about possible to imagine a future where:
Thanks for reading and if you want to try out Friend.Tech here are some sign up codes. I don’t know if they give me anything, maybe I get points or something, who knows? But full disclosure either way :)
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