A Monday report from The Block claimed that a database of 101,000 friend.tech users linking their Ethereum wallet addresses and Twitter accounts had been leaked.
The report cited pseudonymous Yearn Finance contributor Banteg, who tweeted earlier in the day that those who had used the platform had given it access to post as them. Banteg also included a link to a GitHub repository with the user details which has since been removed.
A few hours after the report was made public, the friend.tech team clarified in a tweet that the information was merely built from a web scraper which pulled data from their public application programming interface (API).
This is just someone scraping our public API that shows the association between public wallet addresses and public Twitter usernames.
It’s like saying someone hacked you by looking at your public Twitter feed.
Irresponsible reporting from @TheBlock_ and @vishal4c https://t.co/GIXOWazqBk
— friend.tech (@friendtech) August 21, 2023
Friend.tech is a Web 3 social application built on Coinbase’s Layer 2 network Base that gives people the ability to buy and sell shares in Twitter accounts that have joined the platform, giving shareholders access to a private chatroom with the person behind the account.
When buying a share of a certain account, the price of that share will go up, and similarly, when a person sells a share of that account, the price moves down. When shares are traded, 5% of the share price goes towards the friend.tech treasury and 5% goes to the person behind the share.
The app went viral just days after its launch, and in the last 24 hours, it has generated over $1 million in fees, surpassing the Bitcoin blockchain and decentralized exchange Uniswap.
The platform has now renamed its “shares” of Twitter accounts to “keys,” saying it better illustrates their purpose as in-app items.
