Author: Web3 Observation, Bijie.com
As a representative project in the field of SocialFi , Friend.Tech was once very popular, but now the project has stagnated and its team has given up control of the smart contract. However, this seems to be expected.
On September 8 , the development team of Web3 social network Friend.Tech announced that it had given up control of its smart contracts. By transferring control to an empty address on Ethereum, the developers permanently locked the system and prevented further changes, a move that essentially declared the platform essentially shut down.
The Friend.Tech team said in a statement on the X platform that revenue generated by smart contracts or websites will no longer flow into the team's multi-signature wallet. Although the platform's web client is still functioning normally and the development team has promised not to extract any fees from smart contracts or the platform, the revocation of control makes the future development of the protocol full of uncertainty.
Ethereum's empty address is usually used to destroy tokens, and any assets sent to this address cannot be recovered. This practice may be seen as a way to achieve the vision of decentralization in mature decentralized projects. However, as a project that has only been online for a year, Friend.Tech has not yet matured, and giving up control at this time is widely seen as giving up the future of the project. Some community users also interpret this move as a stagnation in platform development or even the end of the project.
FRIEND token plummets and market value shrinks
As soon as the news came out, the price of Friend.Tech 's native token FRIEND plummeted, and its market value shrank significantly. According to the market data of Bijie.com, as of press time, the price of FRIEND was $ 0.061 , and it fell by more than 50% in the past 24 hours.
It should be noted that in May this year, the price of FRIEND reached a high of $ 2.6 . However, in the past few months, it has fallen all the way to the current $ 0.06 , a drop of more than 97% . The current market value is only $ 5.65 million. The trading volume of FRIEND tokens has also dropped significantly.
According to DefiLlama data, as of September 9 , 2024 , the total value locked ( TVL ) on Friend.Tech has dropped from its historical high of $ 52 million in early October last year to the current $ 3.42 million. In addition, since the end of July , Friend.Tech 's daily revenue has dropped below $ 1,000 , and the number of daily active users has recently been less than 100.
Huang Licheng's 11.1 million FRIENDs lost more than $ 15 million
The person who was hurt the most by Friend.Tech was Huang Machi Big Brother , the top whale in the holdings list. According to on-chain data, Huang Licheng currently holds 11.1 million FRIEND tokens. From May 3 to June 8 , he spent a total of 4,975 ETH (about $ 15.6 million) to buy 8.6 million FRIEND tokens at an average price of $ 1.81 .
However, with the plummeting price of FRIEND tokens, the value of these tokens is only 278 ETH (about $ 640,000 ) at the current market price ($ 0.061 ), with a loss of more than $ 15 million . Considering the liquidity problem in the market, if Huang Licheng chooses to sell, the actual amount that can be cashed out may shrink further.
Friend.Tech ’s decline was expected, and it’s a common problem for most SocialFi projects.
Friend.tech is defined as a Web3 social application that allows users to tokenize their social networks. Since its launch on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Base supported by Coinbase in August last year, Friend.Tech has quickly attracted widespread attention from the crypto community. With the participation of heavyweight KOLs , novel IP monetization methods and potential airdrop expectations, the platform attracted more than 100,000 users in just two weeks, and the cumulative number of users exceeded one million.
However, in just one year, as the early enthusiasm faded, Friend.Tech has gradually lost its former glory. In the past two months, the number of daily active users on the platform has dropped to only a few hundred, and Key 's daily trading volume has dropped from a high of $ 20 million to a few thousand dollars. Even with the launch of V2 and airdrop activities, the platform's activity is still stagnant.
The fall of Friend.Tech reveals a core problem in the SocialFi project: the platform relies too much on financial incentives rather than actual social interactions or creator contributions. Although Friend.Tech initially monetized content through tokenized " keys " , over time, users focused more on financial returns and speculative transactions rather than building deep interactions with creators.
Such projects are overly dependent on speculative activities. Once the token price drops, user enthusiasm fades and platform activity declines rapidly. This also indirectly reflects the fragility of the SocialFi project in the absence of long-term value and practicality.
Although users can profit from financial incentives in the short term, the core users and creators of the platform gradually lost interest after the speculative bubble burst. In the future, the development of the SocialFi project may need to pay more attention to substantive user value and interaction to balance financial incentives with actual application needs. Of course, this also reflects the lifeblood of SocialFi and even the entire Web3 world: how to completely get rid of the model of capital games and achieve traffic fission and value growth only through the upgrade of user experience.
