On May 27, Racer, co-founder of the friend.tech protocol, announced a system design bounty on his social platform and said, "If you can find a way to migrate friendtech from Base without causing major problems for users, and it works well and we decide to use it, we will pay you $200,000."

The news sparked heated discussions in the crypto community. However, as of press time, Racer’s Twitter account is no longer accessible, and it is unclear whether Racer deleted his account after the post. The Official Twitter did not respond to this.

Perhaps affected by this, friend.tech protocol token FRIEND fell to $0.97, a 24-hour drop of 34%. According to monitoring by Ember, Huang Licheng, as the largest liquidity provider of friend.tech, has a floating loss of $7.54 million for the FRIEND he bought with 4,873 ETH. And because friend.tech currently lacks liquidity, the liquidity pool does not support his withdrawal.

Disagreement with Base, and "mutual ridicule" with Farcaster

In the statement, Racer also revealed the frustrations and dissatisfaction he and his team have encountered in the Base ecosystem. According to Racer, the Friend.tech team has always had an unstable relationship with Base and said they were "ostracized by the Base community." Jesse Pollak, head of Base at Coinbase, also admitted that the friend.tech team felt "isolated and disconnected" from Base and some parts of the Ethereum ecosystem.

In addition to this, Racer also pointed out that "When we launched, Farcaster's investors started to slander us because they misunderstood what we were doing. It put a lot of pressure on their team and users, and the relationship has been going downhill since then."

The "slander" mentioned by Racer may refer to the cultural label of "negative speculation" that was attached to friend.tech in its early days. There are also many voices in the community that believe that Friend.tech's design model focused on the Ponzi economy ignores the essence of social applications.

However, Racer specifically mentioning Farcaster here does have a special meaning. After all, as two major social devices of Base, Friend.tech and Farcaster have always been "fighting" in the community.

Previously, Friend.tech chose to "self-deprecate" in order to promote the airdrop information, and sent out several tweets to convey the idea that "only those with money can use Friend.tech." On April 17, the Friend.tech Official Twitter began to ask "What crypto social app would you recommend to users who cannot use Friend.tech because they have no money?" At that time, Farcaster was very popular, and this tweet was also considered by many crypto community members to be a mockery of Farcaster.

The popularity of Farcaster is inseparable from the 40-fold increase of DEGEN in those two weeks. Friend.tech also released a callback chart of DEGEN, the token of the Farcaster ecosystem of the Socialfi application, and wrote "Oh, now I understand why non-rich people hate us so much recently."

The Farcaster community responded without mercy, "This is where Farcaster airdropped for us (before DEGEN skyrocketed), what does the FT airdrop look like? What is the FT airdrop? Are you still waiting?"

Related reading: "Only rich people can use FT", Friend.tech starts to take the black and red route "

Is migration good for Base or FT?

Since Base stated that it would not issue coins, and as the first protocol project to issue coins, Friend.tech protocol token FRIEND is also called the "most Base token."

Jesse Pollak, head of Base, said that Friend.tech has been iterating its products, and its token economic model of 100% airdropping to users is indeed pioneering, and they "pointed the way for the industry."

From Friend.tech’s own perspective, even though the newly released V2 attracted a lot of users due to the airdrop effect, the token trading volume exceeded hundreds of millions of dollars in a week, and the number of clubs created reached hundreds of thousands in a short period of time, but this sign did not last long. V2, like V1, quickly faded out of people’s sight after the hype.

Related reading: " friend.tech is so unpopular, why is FRIEND still being hyped? "

Now Racer's intention to migrate to Friend.tech has also triggered various speculations. Is it because of the incompatibility with Base that Racer's ideas lack support, or is it because the Friend.tech team behind the scenes is not good enough? As someone in Pollak's comment area said, the construction of the FT protocol is very professional, and the problem lies with its marketing team and developers.

At present, the price of FRIEND has not fallen back, and the new features that were previously optimistic have not yet been launched. If the migration really happens, will it be more conducive to the development of the Friend.tech ecosystem? And for Base, will losing Friend.tech be beneficial to the Base ecosystem? All this needs to be judged by time.

But as Pollak said: "I would be sad if the team decided to leave Base, but I would respect and support either path - that's the beauty of a decentralized, on-chain economy."