Machi Big Brother Offers $1M to Revive Friend.tech as FRIEND Surges 3,000%

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Machi Big Brother, Friend.tech, FRIEND, Base, SocialFi,

Machi Big Brother has offered $1 million to take over and relaunch Friend.tech, sending the dormant SocialFi project’s FRIEND token thousands of percent higher within hours.

Huang Licheng, better known as Machi, said Friend.tech was trading below a $300,000 market capitalization when he made the $1 million offer to pseudonymous founder Racer and early investor Paradigm. He proposed a community takeover, or CTO, using FRIEND’s existing Base contract.

FRIEND briefly reached a market capitalization near $9.9 million after the post before retreating. The token was recently valued around $5.7 million, with roughly $1.4 million in 24-hour volume, leaving it more than 3,000% above levels seen before the revival proposal.

Friend.tech Contracts Cannot Simply Be Taken Over

Friend.tech became one of Base’s first major consumer applications after launching in August 2023. Users bought and sold “keys” tied to individual accounts, with ownership providing access to private chats while every transaction generated fees.

The protocol ultimately generated about $64.3 million in cumulative fees before activity collapsed following the FRIEND token launch and Version 2 rollout.

A community revival faces a major technical constraint. Friend.tech permanently set its admin and ownership parameters to the zero address in September 2024, preventing future changes to contract fees or functionality. The separate web client remained operational, but control of the deployed contracts could no longer be recovered through the original admin functions.

Machi’s proposal would therefore require a new community-led frontend, additional contracts or another structure around the existing FRIEND asset rather than simply restoring administrative control over the original system.

Machi Previously Put $16.7M Into FRIEND

Machi already has substantial history with the token. He spent roughly 5,200 ETH worth $16.7 million acquiring about 11.1 million FRIEND during 2024, only for the position to collapse in value as activity disappeared from the platform. The holdings were worth about $700,000 by September 2024.

His latest Friend.tech push comes days after a heavily leveraged Ethereum trade produced another dramatic reversal. Machi recently turned a Hyperliquid account worth about $100,000 into $9.5 million as ETH surged through $2,500.

Base has changed considerably since Friend.tech’s original run. Coinbase’s network has developed a broader SocialFi market around projects such as Zora, where social content and token issuance are increasingly combined inside consumer applications.

FRIEND Liquidity Returns After Revival Offer

The FRIEND contract named in Machi’s post currently holds about 94.9 million tokens in circulation across roughly 85,000 addresses. Its largest active Uniswap V2 liquidity pool contained about $435,000 in combined FRIEND and WETH liquidity during the latest market check.

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FRIEND briefly approached a $10 million valuation after starting the session below $300,000, before pulling back toward the $5 million to $6 million range. No acquisition agreement or Friend.tech relaunch has been announced by Racer or Paradigm.

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Born in Italy, Gianluca is a finance and data specialist, coming from an academic education at Sorbonne University in Paris and a career as Senior Advisor at Ernst & Young in the Banking and Blockchain sector.

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