The Current State of Crypto

Crypto’s history is one with many twists and turns, rugs and pulls, ups and downs. While the original intent of this all was to create a way to build a fairer financial system, somewhere along the way, we all got lost.

Today’s state of crypto is one plagued with corruption and distress. Large scale theft, hacks, and exploits are present everywhere. This doesn’t even include dubious incentive schemes from venture capitalists dumping on retail, retail airdrop farming, token teams not following unlock schedules — and many more you’ve seen in this bear market.

At the end of the day, we’re all striving to create products that end-users will use and gain genuine value from – outside of speculation. Unfortunately, for consumers, crypto as it exists now is a confusing maze to navigate. Let’s suppose you hear about a new product. Immediately, you have a multitude of questions on your mind to help you assess the product’s legitimacy:

• Who is the team behind the project?

• How much TVL/usage do they have?

• Who has invested in or backed the project?

• What are my favourite Twitter influencers saying about this (if they’re saying anything)?

Unfortunately, all of these are simply proxy methods for determining legitimacy. All of these are imperfect measures since you don’t know if the person leaving the review has actually used the product. They’re all anecdotal, unverified experiences.

Ideally, there would be a way for you to read reviews from real, verified users. In web2, many review sites leave the authenticity of the review and reviewer to be unknown. Outside of sites like Amazon, there exist very few ways you can verify that the consumer leaving a review has actually purchased and used the good or service they’re leaving a review for. There isn’t a way for a restaurant to verify whether or not the reviewer has made a purchase at their establishment and actually has the experience required to accurately review the restaurant. In crypto, the consequences of a bad, misleading or fake review are far higher due to the irreversible financial consequences. This creates additional complications when assessing the validity of an unverified review, such as:

• Is this an investor trying to shill their bags?

• Is this an airdrop farmer just writing whatever they want to get rich?

• Is this just the team writing reviews to trick people into believing what they want?

You simply don’t know at the end of the day in web2. What’s different about crypto and web3 is the fact that you have the big picture view: datasets of everything a wallet has ever done, on everything, since the beginning of their wallet-span. On-chain identity is a unique property that adds quantitative and qualitative context around a wallet’s past behaviour. What if we already have all the ingredients to solve the problem of authenticating reviews, but we just all couldn’t collectively see it?

Introducing Fren Reviews

Fren Reviews is the product that the web3 community needs but doesn’t know it does — yet. The idea is simple, yet powerful.

Here’s how you use it:

1. Find a project you want to review

2. Write a text-based review for that project and rate it from 1 to 5 stars

3. Sign the rating and review text with your wallet to submit

4. Congrats – you’ve left a review!

Whether or not your review ends up verified, though, is up to a couple things:

• Whether your wallet has transacted with that project’s smart contracts

• If Fren Reviews knows which smart contracts belong to that project (i.e. the project page is claimed)

Check out the full user flow for leaving a review:

Here’s where it gets interesting 👀

When a project page is claimed, we’ll be able to show how much the reviewer has actually used the project and other data points about the reviewer’s on-chain identity in context with their review. This now means that each verified review can tell you:

1. When was the first time they used this product

2. How much they’ve used this product

3. The net-worth of the reviewer’s wallet

4. How old their wallet is

All of these paint a much clearer, transparent, and honest picture of how legitimate the project in question is and what other users are saying about it.

What about unclaimed projects?

Even if a project hasn’t been claimed on FrenReviews, you can still leave a review on it. However, to maintain the integrity of the platform, those reviews will be clearly marked as “unverified”. However, once the project does become claimed, we’ll retroactively look at whether the reviewer used the product they claimed to have used. If they haven’t, their review is hidden (and never shown again) as it isn’t valid.

To learn how to onboard as a project, fill out our 30 second typeform.

Your frens in the future of web3

Fren Reviews unlocks a new level of trust and transparency for new users, companies building products, and investors in the space. By building a reputation graph around reviews, users, and companies, you can leverage it as composable primitives to build a whole new design space of products. Some of the ideas we’ve imagined but haven’t included in the current scope are:

• Adding reviewer statuses for verified smart contract developers to assess the vulnerability of the codebase

• Creating a reviewer reputation score based on number of reviews left, helpfulness ratings from the wider community, and other on-chain activity

• Allowing users to stake financial value against their reviews creating a token curated registry (TCR) of reviews for that specific product

• … and many more uses cases we’re excited to dream of

Fren Reviews is a unique web3 social product that repackages and innovates on cutting edge big data technology in a crypto native way. To say we’re excited about what it unlocks is an understatement.

How can I get involved, fren?

Visit us at frenreviews.com and simply leave a review for a project you’ve interacted with!

At the beginning, most projects will be unverified – so to help bring us closer to verifying your review, you can also post a screenshot of your review on Twitter (now X), Discord, or Telegram, and tag the project to let them know they should claim their page.

At Fren Reviews, we value high-quality, medium to long-form reviews - so the more insight you can give, the better. We hope for Fren Reviews to become the central place for real users to give real feedback on real products.

Happy reviewing 👋

It’s impossible to convey the emotions our team has surrounding the potential of Fren Reviews in making the Web3 ecosystem a safer, more cohesive community to engage with and grow into.

For now, we’ll end with our tagline because it perfectly represents the ethos we adopted by taking on this project:

FWOFF 👯(frens watch out for frens)

Visit us at frenreviews.com!

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