FriendTech Transfers Control Over Its Contracts To Burn Address

FriendTech, the once-booming SocialFi platform, has abandoned control over its own smart contracts and left the once-thriving Web3 social hub in a state of uncertainty.

On Sep. 8, FriendTech's team transferred the ownership and control of its smart contracts to Ethereum's null address. The null address essentially functions as a burn wallet in the Ethereum ecosystem, with no entity able to access or control the assets sent to it.

“Admin and ownership parameters have been set to 0x000...000 to prevent any changes to their fees or functionality in the future,” FriendTech tweeted. “This change does not affect the separate web client operated at friend.tech, which will continue to function as is. No fees from either smart contracts or friend.tech currently go to the FriendTech dev team multisig.”

The transfer was inferred by many onlookers as effectively shuttering the project, with Rektdiomedes, an author at The Daily Degen, describing the transaction as marking “the end of an era.”

The FriendTech team did not respond to a request for comment from The Defiant.

FriendTech’s rise and fall

FriendTech exploded onto the scene on Aug. 10, 2023, going live one day after Base’s public mainnet launch.

FriendTech was one of the first socialfi protocols to rise to prominence within web3, comprising a platform facilitating the creation and trade of “keys” providing access to gated chatrooms run by web3 influencers — who earned a 5% share of trade volume for their keys.

One month after its launch, FriendTech was beating out Uniswap by fee volume and hosting more than $20 million in daily trade, according to Dune Analytics. An all-time high of nearly 74,000 users also interacted with the platform in mid-October.

However, activity on FriendTech quickly dried up over the coming months, with daily volume slumping to a low of $59,193 from 394 traders on Jan. 17.

FriendTech sought to reinvigorate its community in December by announcing its ongoing development of a v2 iteration, which would be accompanied by an airdrop.

FriendTech v2 went live on May 3, introducing a revamped “club” mechanism, a new points system, and native decentralized exchange BunnySwap.

However, the accompanying airdrop attracted pushback from FriendTech’s community, with users reporting encountering errors when attempting to claim their tokens, and resenting that FRIEND were non-transferable and only tradable on BunnySwap — on which the token’s liquidity pool was seeded with just a single FRIEND token.

While FriendTech v2 inspired a brief resurgence in activity, with more than 62,000 clubs created and 167,000 traders interacting with the protocol on May 3, adoption again evaporated shortly after.

On Sept. 7, v2 hosted a record low of 14 traders and generated just $15 in fees, while key drove an all-time low volume of $4,414 from 33 traders. According to DeFiLlama, FriendTech’s Total Value Locked (TVL) is now just $3.42 million after falling 93.4% from its Oct. 2, 2023 all-time high of $52 million.

On Sept. 9, FriendTech’s FRIEND token also plummeted to a record low of $0.0575 after crashing 52.7% in one week, according to CoinGecko. FRIEND has surprisingly rebounded by 14% in the past hour to last change hands for $0.073. However, the token remains down 97.8% from its May 3 all-time high.