Friend.tech Team Abandons Project, Transfers Platform Control to Burn Address – What’s Going On?

cryptonews.com:

Since graduating with a degree in economics from the University of Birmingham in 2018, Joel has worked as a financial market/cryptocurrency analyst. He firmly believes that emerging crypto technology...

The future of friend.tech, a Base project once touted as the pioneer and leader of the nascent “SocialFi” crypto sector, is up in the air after the friend.tech team appeared to abandon the project, transferring control of the platform to a burn address.

Admin and ownership parameters have been set to 0x000…000 to prevent any changes to their fees or functionality in the future.

This change does not affect the separate web client operated at https://t.co/YOHabcBL3H which will continue to function as is. No fees from either…

As per an X post on September 7, the friend.tech team explained that this transfer of powers would “prevent and changes to their (the platform’s) fees or functionality in the future”.

But this has been widely interpreted by the crypto community as the friend.tech team abandoning the project, as future development will now be impossible.

X user VietnamPenguin called the friend.tech team’s exit an “excellent rug” by the devs and crypto VC form Paradigm.

This was an excellent 'rug' by the devs and @paradigm. For those who are unaware, the entire 'hype' around @friendtech started and persisted precisely because of investments from Paradigm.
It was solely this that allowed devs to collect over $60 million in fees over the year.… https://t.co/3FkpYgNV6k pic.twitter.com/jaeWzXr5pC

VietnamPenguin explained that investments from Paradigm were behind the hype that saw friend.tech rake in over $60 million in fees over the last year.

Moreover, Paradigm exited ahead of the friend.tech devs, declining their allocation