Friend.tech Plunges 25%, Hits All-Time Low After Saying It'll Stay on Base L2

Decentralized social media platform Friend.tech has decided to keep its token and liquidity on Coinbase-incubated layer-2 network Base. It was just last month, on June 10, that the team announced it would leave Base and start its own chain.

But news of the reversal has been even worse for its FRIEND token price than the initial migration announcement.

FRIEND plummeted to a new all-time low of $0.2973 Thursday morning, per data from CoinGecko. At the time of writing, FRIEND is trading 25% lower than it was yesterday, having rebounded slightly to $0.3557.

It's now less than half the price it was trading at on June 10, the day when its announcement that the project would be migrating off the Base L2 was widely panned by its community.

What is Friend.tech?

Friend.tech launched in August 2023 and was greeted with much fanfare and skepticism.

The concept was to create a social media network that allows people to monetize their influence. That means influencers can create "shares" of themselves and earn a fee each time those shares are bought and sold.

But when the term "shares" drew too much scrutiny, the project renamed them to "keys." In the months that followed, excitement for the platform died down. By May 2024, excitement sparked again as the project announced that it was preparing for an airdrop and launching Friend.tech v2.

"$FRIEND was always meant to be a 100% community-controlled token powering the Clubs contract," the project wrote on Twitter late last night. "Migrating the supply and liquidity would not align with that spirit. You'll still be able to create clubs, chat, buy keys, and use $FRIEND on Base in the friendtech app."

The team also said it has turned off protocol fees for BunnySwap, the Friend.tech-native decentralized exchange. After launching in early May, BunnySwap saw its total value locked peak at $53 million, according to DeFi Llama. But as of this writing, the DEX has fallen as low as $10.6 million.

To hear Crypto Quant analyst Bradley Park tell it, having the top spot on Base was Friend.tech's to lose.

"FT was originally one of the leading contributors to the Base boom," he told Decrypt. "However, overshadowed by growth of Farcaster, FT announced that it would move to another chain. They were the original Dapp of Base, but they suddenly left their position."

Park added that the sentiment among the community is that the project has lost its appeal. He added that the drop in the FRIEND price has been punctuated by whale wallets, like this one earlier this morning, exiting their positions.

Sebastian Sinclair contributed to this report.