Whale tries to re-spark interest in Friend.tech (FRIEND)

Friend.tech is seen as a now-defunct project, but there are also attempts to revive the asset. In the past few days, aggressive trading has led to the rise of FRIEND by more than 100%. 

Friend.tech (FRIEND) was among the most promising projects in 2023. In the past day, the FRIEND token turned into one of the biggest daily gainers, rising by more than 100% to trade at $0.42. But the token lacks organic activity. Instead, its price moves are due to direct buying from one of the well-known coin supporters, Jeffrey Huang, also known as @machibigbrother.  Huang’s actions drew attention to the protocol, as he has been influential in previous NFT collections, DAOs, and apps.  

The buying happened in several sessions since August 10, only lifting the FRIEND market price to $0.15 on Bunny Swap, the native Base market. 

FRIEND/ETH chart. (Source: DexScreener)

There is no certain reason for the buying, except for the activity of Huang following mentions of restarting the protocol. The latest buy orders amount to around $330K. Previously, Huang has also bought FRIEND despite a downward trend, realizing up to $15M in losses. 

At this point, the reason for buying FRIEND is uncertain. One possible explanation is arbitrage, since FRIEND trades at a premium on BitMart and other centralized markets. Yet the token is extremely illiquid, with almost no possibility to realize gains from the arbitrage. Some of the centralized exchanges have FRIEND at $0.53, but with no known liquidity depth.

The activity on FRIEND is also reflected in the formation of high-traffic wallet clusters, as visualized by BubbleMaps. A total of three wallet clusters were present as of August 16, making up around 3% of the total FRIEND supply. 

The on-chain activity and DEX buying extended the speculations that the Friend.tech team would consider a crypto buyback and possibly relaunch the project or propose another utility for the token. However, the community remains highly skeptical, and the X accounts of founder Racer are still locked. To make the reputation of FRIEND worse, it was one of the tokens heavily promoted by crypto influencer Ansem, ending up with one of the deepest losses among his top picks. 

The token’s activity sparked speculations on why Huang seems to be accumulating more FRIEND. The underlying protocol is now driven mostly by automated activity, leaving only co-founder Racer and a handful of other large-scale players on the platform. Friend.tech has also declined in terms of content, as well as celebrity interactions. 

Huang has been one of the most influential traders of Apecoin (APE), and among the top 3 recipients of APE allocations in 2022. He also holds and promotes a collection of BAYC NFTs. The APE holdings of Huang had an outsized effect on the market, after he sold off all wallets in April 2022. APE is currently trading near lows of $0.55, abandoning the yearly peak above $2. 

Huang continues to showcase BAYC and MAYC NFTs, some of which have curious trading arcs. In a recent post, Huang showcased Bored Ape #3562, which at one point sold for 430 ETH without even having rare features. 

Friend.tech slowed down after key buying fatigue

Just days ago, Huang also hinted at restarting Friend.tech on Blast or Solana. Currently, the entire SocialFi sector has stalled, with the exception of Galxe, which took up the niche of Friend.tech. Yet Galxe focuses on ongoing quests, while Friend.tech ended up extracting value from the community. 

Friend.tech was also the protocol to invite more celebrities and influencers into crypto. One of the main features of the protocol was Keys, which were a special asset sold by influencers. Platform users bought Keys to gain access to the influencer’s content. This gave value to top accounts based on the cumulative price of all Keys. 

In the end, the community was tired of buying Keys, while the influencers on the platform failed to produce content. The protocol still sees some residual Key trading against FRIEND tokens. Migrating the protocol would create problems with existing Key balances and the distribution of followers. 

Cryptopolitan reporting by Hristina Vasileva