Friend.tech To Exit Coinbase L2 Base, Announces Migration To New Blockchain

The decentralized social network Friend.tech has unveiled plans to move from Coinbase’s Layer 2 blockchain Base to its proprietary network, Friendchain. This development will come as part of the platform’s collaboration with Conduit, a crypto infrastructure service provider.

When Will The New Friend.tech Blockchain Launch?

In a June 8th post on X, web3 social platform Friend.tech revealed its plans to create a new blockchain dubbed “Friendchain,” winding down its partnership with the Coinbase-incubated Base network. According to the announcement, Friendchain is a proprietary blockchain that will utilize the recently launched FRIEND token as a fully transferable gas token.

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Although the decentralized platform’s team didn’t disclose a timeline for the network migration, the announcement did say that users will be kept abreast of relevant information “over the coming months.” It can be deduced from Friend.tech’s message that the Friendchain mainnet migration could take months.

We’re pleased to be working with @conduitxyz on Friendchain, our own blockchain that uses $FRIEND as a fully transferable 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. pic.twitter.com/HRa26vfFEX

— friend.tech (@friendtech) June 8, 2024

However, this development isn’t exactly a surprise, considering that the Friend.tech co-founder Racer had publicly expressed the desire to move the decentralized social platform off Base in late May. In a now-inaccessible post on X, Racer said about Friend.tech team’s shaky relationship with Base:

Farcaster investors went apeshit smearing us when we launched because they misunderstood what we were doing. Pushed it really hard on their team and users and the relationship has been downhill since then with us getting ostracized from anything that is for the ‘Base community.

Following its launch in August 2023, Friend.tech was quick to establish itself as one of the top decentralized applications (dApps) on the Base network. However, the social platform has seen user interest and engagement cool off in recent months.

FRIEND Rallies 17% After New Blockchain Announcement

After Racer hinted at a possible exit from Base, the value of the FRIEND token plunged by 20%. This somewhat compounded the unfavorable sentiment around the token after ITS largely “unsuccessful” airdrop in May.

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This time around, though, the latest confirmation of “Friendchain” had a rather positive impact on the price of FRIEND. According to data from CoinGecko, the cryptocurrency jumped more than 17% following the recent announcement, reaching $1 at some point.

As of this writing, the FRIEND token is valued at $0.93, reflecting an 8% price increase in the past day. However, this latest price spike has not been enough to wipe the token’s loss on the weekly timeframe.

Featured image from Fortune, chart from TradingView