Vitalik Buterin Calls Friend.Tech Bad DeFi Amid Its Fall In 4 Months

Decentralized social media platform Freind.Tech, built atop Coinbase’s Layer-2 platform ‘Base’ is witnessing a major slowdown within just four months of creating a major market frenzy. However, within four months of launch, the craze around this social media platform has been waning away pretty fast.

Vitalik Buterin Refers to Friend.Tech As Bad DeFi

In a recent commentary, Haseeb, the founder of Dragonfly, expressed astonishment at the rapid transformation of Friend.tech from a crypto darling to a deserted project in just four months. The prevailing sentiment suggests that Friend.tech’s bonding curve played a pivotal role in its downfall, prompting a broader reflection on the lessons learned and the subsequent redesign of bonding curves in the crypto space.

Courtesy: Haseeb

Responding to this observation, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin weighed in on the discussion, stating, “Bad gamefi is using financial speculation as a substitute for fun. Blockchain games need to be fun as games,” in an approximation of a sentiment he has shared multiple times.

During the peak of the craze around Freind.Tech, the platform clocked more than $50 million in total value locked. However, as per the DeFiLlama data, the TVL has been on a downfall since then and dropped by 50% in the last four months to $26.46 million as of date.

Buterin Remains Bullish on Farcaster And Lens

While Vitalik Buterin doesn’t hold much bullish views about the future of crypto social, he remains confident about some decentralized social apps like Farcaster and WRT Lens.

Farcaster is a decentralized social app protocol that empowers users to control their data, while also providing developers with the ability to build apps on the network in a permissionless manner. Interestingly, Buterin’s comments come as the Farcaster protocol registers 400% of the daily active users following the introduction of “frames” on its social media application Warpcast.

Frames on Warpcast now enable users to mint NFTs, perform transactions, claim tokens, read external blog posts, and participate in surveys—all within the app itself, eliminating the need to sign a transaction or navigate away. This addition was implemented on Jan. 27.

Also, the Farcaster network experienced significant growth in daily active users, escalating from around 5,000 on Jan. 28 to surpassing 24,700 by Feb. 3, based on data from Dune Analytics. Moreover, the volume of new daily “casts” skyrocketed to over 2 million as of Feb. 3, marking an extraordinary 1,000% surge from the approximately 200,000 recorded the previous week on Jan. 28.

Courtesy: Dune Analytics

Similar to Farcaster, Lens is a decentralized composable social graph, empowering developers to create the next generation of social media applications.

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