Social App Friendzone to Start Operations on Polygon Network This Month

CORRECTION (Feb. 7, 15:13 UTC): Corrects date of introduction to Feb. 26. An earlier version of the story said the start was scheduled for today.

Social marketplace Friendzone will start operating on the Polygon PoS blockchain Feb. 26 and plans to expand to Polygon zkEVM, a different blockchain by Polygon developers, later.

"Friendzone is a new social platform with two main parts," CEO and co-founder Kevin Lu said in a message to CoinDesk. "The surface part is user-friendly and lets people manage their social connections and activities. The deeper part, called LayerSocial, allows developers to create new apps that use the platform's social connections and data."

Registered users surged more than 600% from December to January, and there were 10,000 completed user quests, or activities, in January alone. The pre-launch progressive web app is initially open only to Friendzone's network of partners, investors and in-person event attendees for early sign-ups. It claims to have seen over 3,000 registrations.

Introduction of the app, which uses real-time adaptive pricing and reward distribution to build online communities, will follow August's launch of Friend.Tech. That drew huge hype and volumes for allowing influencers to monetize networks using a chatroom-like service. The hype fizzled out in the months following, with the user base falling more than 90% from its lifetime peak. Stars Arena, likewise, was introduced with massive hype only to later peter out.

Currently, Friendzone is not based on any blockchain. "Our pre-launch app is off-chain, and is designed to enable early registrations and social engagement," Lu said.

Friendzone was built by early team members from Band Protocol, Synthetix and Koinly.

"Friendzone is a place where people can connect and use various apps, and it will start working with other apps this year to make its own app ecosystem grow," Lu added.