Machi Big Brother’s $1 Million Friend.tech Bid Hits Contract Dead End

Friend.tech, a SocialFi protocol built on Coinbase’s Base network, gained prominence by letting users trade access-linked social keys and attracted backing from venture-capital firm Paradigm. Activity and liquidity later collapsed, leaving its FRIEND token and governance structure largely dormant. In September 2024, the team transferred control of the protocol’s smart contracts to a burn address, effectively making the deployed system immutable and removing any administrator capable of upgrading it.

Jeffrey Huang, the crypto trader known as Machi Big Brother, has offered Friend.tech’s founders and Paradigm $1 million to acquire the project and pursue a community takeover, or CTO, aimed at reviving FRIEND. The proposal sent the token surging more than 1,350% at one point. However, because ownership of the core contracts has already been sent to an inaccessible burn address, a buyer could potentially obtain branding, treasury assets or community channels but could not modify the protocol or restore on-chain governance.