After it dropped plans to launch its own chain, multiple of Friend.tech’s main metrics dropped, while users criticized them for “greed or incompetence.”
Friend.Tech, known for tokenizing people’s social networks, enables crypto users to trade “keys” that grant access to private group chats.
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Posted July 12, 2024 at 4:49 pm EST.
Friend.Tech, which secured funding from venture capital firm Paradigm, has lost its steam: the price of the native cryptocurrency for the social tokenization platform, the amount of crypto assets locked in Friend.Tech, and revenue generated by the protocol have plummeted to at or near all-time lows.
In May, the price of a single FRIEND token traded above $3, while in October, Friend.Tech’s total value locked was almost $50 million, both all-time high levels for the social protocol. When it launched in August 2023 and up til October of that year, the protocol was also making millions of dollars in revenue on a weekly basis. But these figures have since dropped substantially.
On Friday, FRIEND slid to an all-time low of 17.7 cents before settling at 20 cents, a 4.7% decrease in the last 24 hours and a 79.2% drop over the past 30 days, deflating its market cap and fully diluted valuation to $18 million, according to CoinGecko.
Likewise, the amount of crypto assets locked in Friend.Tech has shrunk more than 31% from 2,650 ETH one month ago to 1,820 ETH at presstime, while its revenue for each of the last few weeks starting June 16, 23, and 30 was less than $20,000, three of the four top worst-performing weeks for the protocol, data from DefiLlama shows.
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The last tweet from Friend.Tech occurred on July 3 when the account announced how it was slashing plans to build its native blockchain and cutting protocol fees entirely.
Who’s Still Holding FRIEND?
Despite Friend.Tech reaching record lows in several metrics, some still hold FRIEND.
Addresses identified by blockchain analytics firm Nansen as belonging to Jeffrey “Machi Big Brother” Huang and crypto investment firm Sigil Fund are among the largest holders of FRIEND, with the former possessing 8.7 million tokens worth over $1.7 million and the latter having 1.2 million in its wallet address worth roughly $245,000.
Sigil Fund hasn’t transferred any tokens from its wallet since it increased its exposure to FRIEND on May 26 and 27 when the token was above $1. On the other hand, Huang’s address, which currently holds 11.38% of FRIEND’s supply, swapped about $200,000 worth of FRIEND for ETH in the past two days, per Nansen.
“My biggest loss percentage-wise was $FRIEND,” wrote the co-founder of DeFi creator studio Pink Brains who goes by the screen name @DefiIgnas on X. “All major influencers cashed out, but I got stuck holding the bag.”
“I genuinely wanted them to succeed in creating a consumer-facing app that combines the best of crypto: speculation and social elements. Unfortunately, short-term greed or incompetence ruined everything,” @DefiIgnas added.
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Additionally, a number of crypto users on X have tagged Friend.Tech’s pseudonymous founder Racer and Paradigm, asking where they are and how involved they are in the project currently.
Friend.Tech is known for tokenizing people’s social networks by allowing users to trade “keys” on its platform that provide access to private group chats. On Friend.Tech, the last 33 trades for Racer’s keys were all sells. One month ago. Racer’s keys were trading at 0.784 ETH, but have dropped about 44% to 0.441 ETH, valued at $1,384 at current prices. Racer’s X account that is linked to his Friend.Tech profile does not exist anymore.
Paradigm did not provide commentary in light of Friend.Tech’s circumstances, while Friend.Tech did not respond to Unchained’s request for comment.
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