On May 27, Racer, co-founder of the friend.tech protocol, posted a system design bounty on his social platform and said, "If you can find a way to migrate friendtech from Base without causing major problems for users, and it works well, we decide to use it, we will pay you $200,000."
The news sparked heated discussions in the crypto community. However, as of press time, Racer's twitter account is no longer accessible, and it is unclear whether Racer deleted his account after the post. The friend.tech official Twitter account did not respond to this.
Perhaps affected by this, the friend.tech protocol token FRIEND fell to $0.97, a 24-hour drop of 34%. According to Ember's monitoring, Huang Licheng, as the largest liquidity provider of friend.tech, has a floating loss of $7.54 million for the FRIEND he bought with 4,873 ETH. And because friend.tech currently has insufficient liquidity, the liquidity pool does not support his withdrawal.
In the statement, Racer also revealed the frustration and dissatisfaction he and his team encountered in the Base ecosystem. According to Racer, the Friend.tech team has had a rocky relationship with Base and expressed "ostracism by the Base community." Jesse Pollak, head of Base at Coinbase, also admitted that the friend.tech team felt "isolated and disconnected" from Base and parts of the Ethereum ecosystem.
In addition, Racer also pointed out that "when we launched, Farcaster's investors began to slander us because they misunderstood what we were doing. A lot of pressure was put on their team and users, and the relationship has been going downhill since then."
The "slander" that Racer mentioned may refer to the cultural label of "negative speculation" that was attached to friend.tech in the early days of its launch. There are also many voices in the community that Friend.tech's design model that focuses on the Ponzi economy ignores the essence of social applications.
However, Racer specifically named Farcaster here for a different reason. After all, as two major social networks in Base, Friend.tech and Farcaster have always been "fighting" with each other in the community.
Previously, Friend.tech chose to "self-deprecate" to promote the airdrop information, and sent several tweets in a row to convey the idea that "only money can use Friend.tech". On April 17, Friend.tech's official Twitter account began to ask "What crypto social app would you recommend to users who cannot use Friend.tech because they have no money?" At that time, Farcaster was very popular, and this tweet was also considered by many members of the crypto community to be a mockery of Farcaster.
The popularity of Farcaster is inseparable from the 40-fold increase of DEGEN in those two weeks. Friend.tech also released a callback chart of DEGEN, the token of the Farcaster ecosystem of the Socialfi application, and wrote "Oh, now I understand why non-rich people hate us so much recently."
The Farcaster community responded without mercy, "This is where Farcaster airdropped for us (before DEGEN skyrocketed). What does the FT airdrop look like? What is the FT airdrop? Are you still waiting?"
Related reading: ""Only rich people can use FT", Friend.tech has begun to take the black and red route"
Since Base said it would not issue tokens, and as the first protocol project to issue tokens, Friend.tech protocol token FRIEND is also called "the most Base token".
Base head Jesse Pollak said that Friend.tech has been iterating its products, and its token economic model of 100% airdropping users is indeed pioneering, and they "pointed the way for the industry".
From Friend.tech's own perspective, even though the newly released V2 attracted a lot of users under the airdrop effect, the token trading volume exceeded hundreds of millions of dollars in a week, and the number of Club creations reached hundreds of thousands in a short period of time, but this sign did not last long. V2 is still the same as V1, and it quickly faded out of people's sight after the hype.
Related reading: "friend.tech is so unpopular, why is FRIEND still being hyped? "
Now Racer's intention to migrate to Friend.tech has also triggered various speculations. Is it because of the disagreement with Base that Racer's ideas lack support, or is it because the team behind Friend.tech itself is not good enough? Just like someone in Pollak's comment area reported that the construction of the FT protocol is very professional, and the problem lies in its marketing team and developers.
Currently, the price of FRIEND has not seen a callback, and the new features that were previously optimistic have not yet been launched. If the migration really happens, will it be more conducive to the development of the Friend.tech ecosystem? And for Base, will losing Friend.tech be good for the Base ecosystem? All this will take time to judge.
But as Pollak said: "If the team decides to leave Base, I will feel sorry, but I will respect and support any path - this is the beauty of decentralized, on-chain economy."
欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群:
Telegram 订阅群:https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram 交流群:https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Twitter 官方账号:https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia