The rise and fall of Friend.tech | Protos
Friend.tech, the BitClout lookalike that was once the most popular application on Coinbase’s layer 2 of Ethereum, has removed the ability to change the smart contract code. Administrators transferred permission to edit its smart contract to Ethereum’s ‘burner’ null address this week. Critics quickly declared its network ‘effectively dead.’ To date, the market capitalization of its token has declined 96% from $235 million to less than $10 million. Its protocol’s total value locked has declined a similar 93%. After processing tens of thousands of daily transactions during its launch in August and September 2023, use of Friend.tech on Coinbase’s Base dwindled to nearly zero by November. Ever since, users have continued to neglect the network, with August 2024 transactions totaling barely a few hundred per day. In 2023, Ethereum layer 2s like Arbitrum and Optimism were one of the hottest new things in crypto. That year, Arbitrum was airdropping its highly-anticipated ARB token, and O...