FRIEND Soars After Machi Big Brother Bids $1 Million For Friend.tech

Jeffrey Huang, the Taiwanese entrepreneur who trades and posts as Machi Big Brother, offered $1 million to buy friend.tech from co-founder Racer and Paradigm, the venture firm that led the SocialFi app’s seed round.

There is little left to buy. The friend.tech dev team transferred ownership of its trading contracts to Ethereum’s null address in September 2024, and the owner() function on the FriendtechSharesV1 contract still returns all zeros, so nobody can change the code or redirect its fees. Huang narrowed the target in a reply: “I just need the X account and url.”

“Friendtech is trading at less than 300k market cap,” he posted at 12:07 a.m. ET Thursday. “I’m offering a 1 mil usd buyout offer to Racer and @paradigm. We can CTO relaunch $FRIEND.” CTO is shorthand for a community takeover, in which holders of an abandoned token restart development themselves.

Twenty-Eight Times In An Hour

FRIEND traded at $0.0031 before the post, a market cap of about $297,000 against the 94,885,121 tokens the contract reports as total supply. It closed the 1 a.m. ET quarter-hour at $0.0878, 28 times the pre-post price.

By 10:30 a.m. ET the token had given back most of that, trading at $0.0219 in its deepest market, the FRIEND/WETH pool on Base, where liquidity stood at $264,757. CoinGecko showed FRIEND at $0.0267 on Thursday morning, up 947% over 24 hours, for a market cap of $2.54 million on $2.83 million of volume and a 24-hour range of $0.0025 to $0.098. The token is down 99.2% from the $3.26 it printed on its first day of trading.

Sixty-Four Million In Fees

friend.tech launched in August 2023 and lets users trade “keys” giving access to a creator’s private chat, charging a 10% fee on every trade. It collected $1.7 million in fees in a single day within two weeks of launch, ranking second to Ethereum at the time. Daily fees peaked at $2.27 million on Sept. 13, 2023, and the app has taken $64.31 million in fees and $32.06 million in revenue over its life, according to DefiLlama.

Those numbers stopped moving long ago. The app collected 12 cents in fees on Wednesday, and the 26 days of August before Thursday produced $155 between them. Thursday’s total stands at $4,509 and is still climbing, the most since Oct. 31, 2025. None of it reached the protocol, which DefiLlama credits with no revenue on any day this week, leaving the whole take with key holders.

The shares contract still holds 924.93 ETH, about $2.33 million at Thursday’s prices — the bonding-curve reserve backing outstanding keys, which holders can sell into whether or not anyone owns the app. The reserve is more than twice Huang’s offer.

Two Years Of Winding Down

The FRIEND token crashed 67% within three hours of its May 3, 2024 launch, falling from $3.26 to $0.89 as users hit errors trying to claim. Daily active users had already dropped from 74,000 in October 2023 to under 1,000 by that April.

In July 2024 the team scrapped its planned FriendChain layer 3 and cut protocol fees to zero. Two months later it handed the contracts to the burn address, saying “no fees from either smart contracts or friend.tech currently go to the FriendTech dev team multisig.”

The @friendtech account has not posted since Sept. 27, 2025, when it listed the platform’s top five trending clubs. The domain still serves a working app.

No Reply From Either Side

Neither Racer nor Paradigm had responded publicly by Thursday morning. friend.tech remains listed in Paradigm’s portfolio as a “SocialFi app on Base.”

Huang’s post drew 367,000 views and 233 replies in its first 10 hours, including pushback from NFT collector seedphrase. “Respectfully, sir. You can’t even get your own meme above a $1M mcap,” he wrote. “What makes you think CTO’ing $FRIEND will be a success?”

Huang answered: “CTO brother. Community effort. We do it together.” He also wrote: “I don’t need to sell the token to buy Friendtech.”