Decentralized social media platform Friend.tech plans to migrate from Coinbase’s layer 2 network Base to its own blockchain.
In a June 8 announcement on X, the Friend.tech team said it had teamed up with crypto infrastructure platform Conduit to build its own network dubbed Friendchain, using the FRIEND as its gas token.
“We’ll keep you up-to-date with all the info you need over the coming months as we build out this exciting new chapter,” said the Friend.tech team.
The price of FRIEND rallied over 60% to a high of $1.34 within 30 minutes of the X announcement, but has seen a considerable decline since, according to data from CoinMarketCap. At the time of writing, the token was trading at around $0.70, down 20% in the last 24 hours.
Several users questioned the need for Friend.tech to build its own separate blockchain, with some arguing that there was no real benefit for a social-focused chain to choose this direction, while others raised concerns that gas costs paid out in FRIEND could be higher than the average levels on Base.
One pseudonymous user “@lazyvillager1” commented that the move was short -term bullish, but mid-term bearish for the project.
“The ultimate long-term vision is for backers/investors to continue clipping protocol fees and to exit at a SaaS multiple to a Web2 company on being the Web3 portal for monetized social media. FT [Friend.tech] trying to capture the value accrual to-chain today is too hedonistic,” said the user.
The decision to migrate away from Base isn’t all that surprising, given Friend.tech’s pseudonymous founder Racer’s comments last month.
“System design bounty: If you can figure out a way to migrate friendtech off of Base without causing major issues for users, and it works well enough that we decide to use it, we will pay you $200K,” said Racer in an X post, first reported by The Block. Racer’s X post appears to have since been deleted.
Base creator Jesse Pollak shared his thoughts on the situation in an X post of his own, acknowledging that the Friend.tech product was “incorrectly culturally labelled as ‘negatively speculative’ by certain parts of the broader ecosystem across Base and Ethereum, which made the team feel isolated and disconnected early on.”
“I’ll be sad if the team decides to leave Base, but I also respect and will support whatever path — that’s the beauty of the decentralized, onchain, economy!” Pollak said.
