Original author: Wenser
Original source: Odaily Planet Daily
As the most popular L2 network in 2024, the Base ecosystem has run out of the Friend.tech and Farcaster two major social protocols, the former fell silent after experiencing the heat in August last year, but recently with the launch of the FRIEND token and the V2 version, the Club gameplay has once again attracted a lot of attention in the market, and the latter has been built in the OP ecosystem in the early stage, and will be backed by the Base ecosystem and launched Frame in January 2024 applications and with the advantages of the Meme coin craze including DEGEN, it has gradually walked out of its own "social forum road".
Today, Odaily will take a look at the performance of the two popular products in the SocialFi track, Friend.tech and Warpcast (the underlying protocol is Farcaster), from a data perspective.
1. Basic data: number of users + agreement revenue
According to Dune data, the total number of users in Friend.tech is currently 909861 unique addresses, and the protocol revenue is 17056.5 ETH (about 54.647 million US dollars), of course, this is data from August 2023 to early May 2024, and the overall duration is about 9 months.
https://dune.com/msilb7/friendtech-on-base-activity
According to Dune data, the total number of Farcaster users is currently 344, 474 unique users, and the protocol revenue is $1.234 million, it is worth noting that Farcaster's protocol revenue data began in early October 2023, compared to the situation that Friend.tech was popular on the whole network as soon as it was launched and the fee was soft, Farcaster's protocol revenue was only a few thousand dollars at the beginning, which can be said to be a huge gap.
https://dune.com/queries/3397864/5702593
2. Advanced data: inflow assets + transaction data
After understanding the fundamentals of the two social products, we can further compare the inflow asset data and trading volume data of the two.
According to Dune data, the total inflow of assets into Friend.tech was 31, 877.59 ETH (about $102 million), and the overall trading volume was 13, 681, 507.
https://dune.com/msilb7/friendtech-on-base-activity
Farcaster's asset inflow data statistics are difficult, and data analysis platforms such as Dune do not have corresponding panels and accurate data, but if each registered user of Warpcast wants to join some paid channels, they need to buy $25 of Warp as an in-app token, with an exchange ratio of about 1:100, and the total number of inflow assets can be roughly calculated at $9.538 million based on 381, 544 unique addresses. Since the client applications supported by the Farcaster protocol, including Warcast, include on-chain and off-chain operations, and according to relevant data, the number of posts in the Farcaster ecosystem is about 1.26 million, so we will not expand too much on the transaction volume data related to Farcaster here.
https://dune.com/pixelhack/farcaster
3. High-level data: token data + daily active users
On the basis of the above data comparison, perhaps the most important data comparison should be the difference between the token data and the daily active user data, the former represents the current market attention and the number of deep participants, and the latter represents the long-term development direction and loyal followers of the project and product.
According to Coingecko data, the current price of the Friend.tech token FRIEND is $2.67, with a total circulation of 90.91 million and an overall market capitalization of $242 million.
Screenshot of Coingecko's website
The Farcaster protocol does not issue a corresponding token, so we will compare DEGEN tokens, which have a wide range of applications in the Farcaster ecosystem.
According to Coingecko data, the current DEGEN price is $0.02138, with a total circulation of $36.96 billion and an overall market capitalization of $266 million.
Screenshot of Coingecko's website
In terms of daily active users, according to TheBlock's website, the average daily active users of Friend.tech have dropped from nearly 80,000 users in mid-October last year to about 3,000 (1,360 independent sellers and 1,640 independent buyers).
TheBlock 统计界面
According to Dune data, the number of original creators in the Farcaster ecosystem is about 38,500, and the overall number of active users is about 43,000.
Farcaster daily active user data interface
It is worth noting that, according to Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster, posted on the X platform that Farcaster reached a record high of 85,000 single-day active users in April, and reached "average daily active users exceeded 70,000" and "monthly active users exceeded 200,000" in the first month.
Bottom line: Friend.tech is more profitable, and Farcaster has more loyal fans
After the above data comparison, we can draw the following conclusions in stages:
- In terms of profitability, Friend.tech achieved a higher profitability ratio through higher Key and Club sales taxes, resulting in more agreement revenue;
- In terms of product cycle, although the Farcaster ecosystem was launched earlier than Friend.tech, in terms of the base ecosystem entry time cycle, Farcaster developed later than Friend.tech, in other words, Friend.tech has a certain first-mover advantage, and the product has entered the V2 version of Club hype, while Farcaster mainly relies on the construction of different applications and channels in the ecosystem, so the development of the product cycle is relatively slow;
- In terms of loyal fans, the number of loyal fans in the Farcaster ecosystem is much greater than that of Friend.tech, which is not only due to the relatively higher entry barrier of Friend.tech, but also to a certain extent affected by the product functions of the two.
- In terms of product positioning, the Farcaster ecosystem is more like Internet forums such as Reddit and Tieba, while the Friend.tech is similar to products such as Web3 paid version of Knowledge Planet and text Clubhouse, the former is oriented to group communication, and the latter is more of a one-to-many club-style communication.
In addition, although both of them give a certain amount of hype and speculative value to the content (Cast) or Key and Club, relatively speaking, the speculative attributes of Friend.tech products are stronger and the positive feedback is more direct, while the products of the Farcaster ecosystem are more inclined to value empowerment in terms of community incentives and member exchanges, so in the long run, the potential of the Farcaster ecosystem is relatively stronger and the user stickiness is stronger.
Therefore, who is the name of the "king of socialization", perhaps we still need to observe for a longer time before we can come to a relatively clear answer.