Friend.tech transfers smart contract control to a null address, causing uncertainty and a 26% drop in its token price.
Confident of Friend.tech’s smart contracts are now controlled by an unchangeable null address.
The staff of friend.tech, a cryptocurrency social media platform, moved the ownership and administration of its smart contracts to Ethereum’s null address, irreversibly giving up control over them, which caused the token to crash.
According to friend.tech on X that same day, the move was done on September 8 to “prevent any changes to their fees or functionality in the future.”
The platform’s token, FRIEND, after the transfer, fell by almost 26% the previous day to $0.067, according to CoinGecko.
Any token delivered to Ethereum’s null address is irreversibly lost; it is a burn address intended to destroy tokens. Tokens given to the address cannot be retrieved or used again.
Ethos, a creator of blockchain reputation systems, was posted on X by Serpin Taxt. Tech’s move was “not at all how I saw it playing out” and marked the “end of an era.”
The smart contract modification was made three months after friend.tech revealed it would create its blockchain, or “Friendchain,” leaving the community uncertain about the protocol’s future course.
Confusion increased when Friend.tech’s X account later removed its announcement post.
The crew at friend.tech and its users became more tense as numerous users encountered difficulties obtaining the highly anticipated FRIEND airdrop at the beginning of May.
In the first four days of debut, the token’s market worth climbed to $233.6 million, currently only $6.3 million.
According to DefiLlama, the entire value locked on friend.tech has also decreased, from an all-time high of $52 million in early October 2023 to less than $3.5 million.
Since late July, the protocol’s daily costs have continuously fallen below $1,000, and the volume of FRIEND trades has decreased at a comparable rate.
Friend.tech is a native Ethereum layer 2 Base application that lets content producers charge for their work in exchange for tokenized shares, or “keys.” Hive, Decentralized Social, and Theta Network are among its competitors.