The decentralized social media platform Friend.tech has seen its revenue and total value locked (TVL) on its platform touching new peaks, notably surpassing 10,000 ETH and 30,000 ETH respectively. Launched in August 2023, Friend.tech has contended with quite a few critics since its inception, some of whom even prognosticated its imminent demise.
The platform functions by allowing users to swap “keys” associated with X accounts (formerly Twitter) of either friends or influencers. This evolution of the social media idea effectively grants the user access to private in-app chatrooms and exclusive content. Although the concept of a decentralized social media platform with a revenue-sharing model sparked excitement in the Web3 space, it simultaneously attracted attention from naysayers. Some even posited that it was “dead on arrival”, questioning its revenue model and predicting it would last only 6-8 weeks. Critics also called into question the speed at which share prices increased in the first couple of weeks, sounding an alarm bell about its long-term sustainability.
Nevertheless, Friend.tech continues to refute these negative predictions, achieving record surges in revenue and user growth. The latest increase in revenue accompanied a jump in user base, recording over 9,200,882 communicative transactions on the platform. While the current trading volume indicates a dip from the surge observed in the first week of September, the unrelenting upward trend in revenue and TVL suggests the platform isn’t losing its grip on its user base.
On the darker side of the crypto world, the third quarter of 2023 emerged as the year’s “most financially damaging” period, inflicting losses of nearly $700 million in digital assets across different security incidents. A quarterly report of blockchain security firm CertiK revealed a total of 184 security incidents this period, with private key compromises ranked as the most damaging category, causing losses of over $204m across 14 incidents.
Two other prevalent exploit types were exit scams and oracle manipulation, costing the industry over $55 million and $16 million respectively. The report further uncovers that North Korea’s state-linked hacking group Lazarus was still a substantial threat, accounting for at least $291 million in confirmed losses in 2023 and persisting with its activities in the third quarter. Overall, the astronomical losses signal that the industry must renew its focus on enhancing security measures to safeguard digital assets from potential threats.
Source: Cointelegraph
