Friend.tech, which lets people use crypto to buy “shares” of X accounts, hits 100K users, per a database of wallet addresses that has raised privacy concerns
but it feels like I'm selling my body. And I like it. [image] Jeremy Allaire / @jerallaire : Funny, I was saying the exact same thing to a group of users on https://friend.tech/. That seems like a pretty compelling use case. BusinessSocialFi. @bantg : pro tip: if you emulate a journo headline for the lolz or for a rhetorical reason, a journo brain is wired to recognize game and skip any and all fact checking. @tomkysar : leaked? dawg the addy is on your profile next to a link to your twitter Steven / @dogetoshi : @tomkysar I think the debate goes into whether there was some public database (which should have been private) already linking the accounts and addresses that @bantg found and published or whether Bantg manually scraped and connected the accounts and addresses together. @poordart : Okay shitposting aside - does this allow people to link twitter usernames to friendtech-wallets or nah? If no - nobody cares, it's public info anyways If yes - arkham and the IRS gonna have a field day? @blknoiz06 : BREAKING: blockchains are public ledgers @alexsmirnov__ : @TheBlock__ That's not really a leak. For most tech-savvy users it was obvious that Twitter and deposit addresses can be linked. I think https://friend.tech/ should have made it more explicit and notified users that their deposit address will become public and will be traced by Twitter... @bantg : (quoting just as an example) saw a lot of similar takes, seems like a weird deflection. where does it come from? can someone show me where do you read the twitter handles on chain? @0xfoobar : we asked for mass adoption and now they're writing threads about how blockchain addresses are public @shazow : How it started / How it's going ✨🌈 the magic of open source and not “waiting until it's ready”, thanks @bantg [image] Steven / @dogetoshi : Deleting my browser history after doing Friend Tech research
Context & Ripple Effects
Friend.tech’s reported user milestone follows an invite-only beta that had already generated notable trading activity on Base, as covered in its early trading-led launch. The new concern is not just growth, but how easily activity can be connected back to public social identities.
The model also revisits a prior social-token experiment: BitClout’s tokenization of Twitter personalities drew controversy over consent. Friend.tech adds a privacy dimension because wallet deposits may be publicly traceable to linked X accounts.
First-order effects
- Users whose Friend.tech wallets are matched to X accounts can have deposits and participation correlated with a public social identity, weakening the practical privacy of their activity.
- Friend.tech’s growth is now accompanied by a trust challenge: the service must contend with privacy concerns as its wallet-address database becomes more visible.
Second-order effects
- Other social-token products will face pressure to make identity-linkage and transaction visibility clearer, since public-wallet mechanics can turn social participation into observable financial activity.
- Creators and X account holders may weigh the promotional upside of tokenized shares against the reputational and privacy costs of being publicly associated with wallet activity.
Third-order effects
- If social-finance products keep tying public profiles to transparent blockchain records, privacy design and consent may become core competitive constraints rather than secondary product details.
- The episode points to a broader tension between crypto’s pseudonymous identity model and social platforms’ public identity layer; resolving it may determine whether such products reach beyond early adopters.
The trend: Social-finance apps are testing whether tradable online reputation can scale without making users’ financial activity too readily linkable to their public identities.