Friend.Tech Plummets After Abandoning FriendChain

The native token of Friend.Tech, the once-booming SocialFi platform, has suffered a sharp sell-off after the project bailed on its appchain plans.

On July 3, Friend.Tech announced it had abandoned its vision for FriendChain and slashed protocol fees to zero for both the Friend.Tech protocol and the associated BunnySwap exchange.

The move precipitated a 35% crash in the price of FRIEND, with the token now down more than 90% from its all-time high, according to CoinGecko.

The pivot to abandon the chain comes following community outrage in response to Friend.Tech launching its own blockchain at a time when Layer 2 and Layer 3 saturation has become a major pain point for users due to liquidity fragmentation. After axing the move, Friend.Tech will continue to operate on Base.

FriendChain was set to be built using the assistance of Conduit, an Ethereum rollup deployer, and would act as the native blockchain hosting Friend.Tech. The network was expected to host Friend.Tech v2, BunnySwap, and all future ecosystem products.

Declining revenue

At its peak in October 2023, Friend.Tech regularly touted more than 10,000 daily active users (DAU) and brought daily revenue of $100,000. Revenue even broke above $1 million on Sept. 14, according to TokenTerminal.

However, the metrics have only gone down since, with the decision to remove protocol fees destroying Friend.Tech’s revenue. On July 6l Friend.Tech hosted just 220 daily users and brought revenue of $1.

Crypto investor Seedphrase responded to the announcement on social media.

“Community-aligned incentives helped V1 be a standout success,” Seedphrase said. “Unfortunately you didn’t capture this with the V2 launch when you decided to keep all of the fees for yourselves. Good to see the FT team change course, but only time will tell if it’s too little; too late.”

Related: Friend Tech Enjoys Activity Resurgence After V2 Rollout