Highlights
- Jeffrey Huang, known as Machi Big Brother, has offered $1 million to acquire Friend.tech.
- Friend.tech's market cap has fallen under $300,000, a fraction of its 2023-2024 peak.
- The offer was made directly to founder Racer and to Paradigm, the venture firm behind Friend.tech's backing.
- Huang proposes reviving the app through a community takeover of its CTO (contract/technical ownership) role.
- Huang was previously one of Friend.tech's largest individual buyers, putting over $5 million into its FRIEND token in 2024.
Crypto investor Jeffrey Huang, widely known by his online persona Machi Big Brother, said on X that he has offered $1 million to acquire Friend.tech, the once-buzzy SocialFi app built on Coinbase's Base network, according to PANews. Huang said Friend.tech's market capitalization now sits below $300,000, and that he has made the offer directly to founder Racer and to Paradigm, the crypto-focused venture firm that backed the project early on. If the acquisition goes through, Huang said he intends to relaunch Friend.tech through what he described as a community takeover of the project's CTO function, effectively handing day-to-day technical stewardship to its remaining user base rather than running it top-down.
From Category-Defining App to Sub-$300K Valuation
Friend.tech launched in mid-2023 and briefly became one of the most-hyped consumer crypto products of that cycle, letting users buy and sell “keys” tied to X accounts to unlock private chat access. At its peak, the app generated tens of millions of dollars in trading volume and drew comparisons to a new SocialFi category altogether, but usage and token price collapsed sharply through 2024 as novelty faded and incentive-driven trading dried up. Huang has a long history with the project: he was one of its largest individual token buyers, at one point investing over $5 million into FRIEND across a two-day span in 2024 in an attempt to prop up its price, an effort that ultimately failed to reverse the app's decline. That history makes this acquisition bid less a speculative outsider play and more a continuation of a position Huang has held, and defended publicly, for roughly two years.
Why a Community CTO Model Is Notable
Related: Metaplex Has Bought Back 13% of MPLX Supply Since Launch
Reviving a defunct or moribund crypto protocol through a community takeover isn't unprecedented — several DeFi and NFT projects have handed control to community multisigs or DAOs after founding teams stepped back — but doing so for a consumer social app with a real off-chain brand and IP raises different questions, including who retains legal ownership of the Friend.tech name and whether Paradigm, as an investor, would need to sign off on any change of control. A $1 million price tag for a project that once processed significant fee volume signals just how far sentiment around SocialFi has fallen since 2023's peak, but it also means the acquisition cost is low enough that a community-funded buyout is plausible without requiring a large treasury or new token issuance.
What to Watch Next
The offer's next milestone is whether Racer or Paradigm formally respond; neither had publicly commented on Huang's bid at the time of his post. If the deal advances, the key detail to watch will be exactly how a “community CTO” is structured — whether through a multisig, a DAO vote, or a more informal steering group — since that structure will determine whether Friend.tech's revival attempt looks more like a genuine relaunch or another short-lived headline in SocialFi's boom-bust history.
