Friend.tech's long-dormant token surged more than 1,800% on Thursday, Aug. 27, after crypto trader Machi Big Brother offered $1 million to buy and relaunch the once-popular social platform.
Chart showing FRIEND's token price. Source: CoinGecko
- FRIEND traded around $0.057 at the time of writing, up about 1,850% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.
- The token briefly reached nearly $0.098, taking its market value close to $10 million before pulling back to about $5.4 million.
The move followed an X post from Jeffrey Huang, a Taiwanese-American musician, serial tech entrepreneur, and prominent crypto trader better known as Machi Big Brother, who said Friend.tech was valued at less than $300,000 when he made a $1 million buyout offer to pseudonymous founder Racer and Paradigm, the venture firm that backed the project.
Huang said the project could then undergo a "CTO relaunch," referring to a community takeover.
- There's no indication so far that Racer or Paradigm has accepted the proposal.
- Huang didn't spell out what exactly the $1 million would purchase.
Trying to revive a project left for dead
Friend.tech was one of crypto's biggest SocialFi experiments when it launched on Coinbase-backed Base in August 2023. The app allowed users to buy and sell "keys" granting access to private chats with creators and crypto personalities. At its peak, the project generated millions of dollars in fees, per data from DefiLlama.
In September 2024, Friend.tech's developers transferred the admin and ownership rights of its smart contracts to a null address, permanently preventing changes to their fees and core functionality.
The team said the web app would remain online, but the move effectively froze the protocol in its existing form.
That could complicate any attempted takeover. Because the original Base contracts can no longer be administratively changed, a revival may require rebuilding parts of the product around the existing token or launching new infrastructure rather than simply taking control of the old protocol.
Huang has considerable history with the FRIEND token himself. In 2024, on-chain analytics firm Spot On Chain estimated that he had spent roughly $18 million accumulating nearly 16 million FRIEND tokens before the project's collapse. By September of that year, the firm estimated his losses at more than $15 million.
The token remains extraordinarily thin despite Thursday's surge. CoinGecko shows only about 95 million FRIEND in circulation and relatively shallow liquidity across its main decentralized-exchange markets, meaning relatively modest buying can produce unusually large price swings.
FRIEND also remains roughly 98% below its May 2024 all-time high of $3.26 despite Thursday's jump.