Once booming projects, now mere dust and ashes
- Core Viewpoint: Using Friend.tech, Blur/Blast, and ORDI as examples—three projects that were once immensely popular—the article reveals the rapid cycle of crypto market hotspots from explosive growth to fading into obscurity. It emphasizes that their wealth effects are often short-lived and unsustainable, with the value of most projects ultimately shrinking significantly.
- Key Elements:
- The Friend.tech token FRIEND has fallen from its all-time high of $3.2 to approximately $0.004, with its market cap shrinking from $230 million to around $400,000, a drop of over 99.8%. The project is essentially defunct.
- The Blur token BLUR has fallen from its high of $1.24 to around $0.02, a decline of 96.8%; its associated L2 project Blast's token BLAST has seen a maximum historical drawdown of 98.2%.
- Although the inscription leader ORDI once achieved a nearly 30,000x increase and broke above $90, its current price is around $2.2, representing a drop of about 87.4% from its peak, and market attention has shifted elsewhere.
- Commonalities in project failures include: team operational issues (e.g., the Friend.tech team abandoning the project), fading narrative hype, and significant losses for early holders (including large investors).
- The article points out that the wealth-creation effect in the crypto market is shrinking. Whether a project can survive long-term depends on its ability to generate sustainable cash flow, not on temporary conceptual hype.
Original｜Odaily（@OdailyChina）
Author｜Wenser（@wenser 2010 ）
Some time ago, a tweet by Christian, the founder of Infini, sparked considerable discussion within the crypto community. In the tweet, he shared his personal "diamond hands experience"—upon logging back into friend.tech, he discovered that his FRIEND tokens, once valued at a peak of $7 million, could now only be sold for $10,000. He then went on to mention the "wallet woes" of a generation of crypto enthusiasts—countless NFTs that have gone to zero.
Looking back from the vantage point of 2026 at the successive waves of hype that have swept through the crypto space, many once-famous projects have now sunk to their lowest points. The once-thrilling fruits of immense wealth have gradually withered and shriveled, turning into inconspicuous grains of sand in the long river of time.
The Fall of SocialFi's Former Darling: The Faded Glory of the Friend.tech Series
When it comes to Friend.tech, the red-hot SocialFi product that launched in August 2023, many might still remember the bustling scene back then.
Friend.tech, championing the concept of "monetizing social access," became the sole industry hotspot within just a few months. Suddenly, countless "FT (short for Friend.tech) clones" emerged across all public chains and platforms. The prices of Keys (chatroom access) for many celebrities skyrocketed, rapidly climbing from prices like 0.0xx ETH to 0.x ETH, even several ETH, or over a dozen ETH.
Despite being in a crypto bear market at the time, this still represented an "expensive entry ticket" costing thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Coupled with the subsequent news of renowned VC Paradigm participating in the seed round funding, in a crypto industry where assets are the primary product, Friend.tech was momentarily unrivaled in popularity.
Even more legendary is the fact that the Friend.tech team consisted of only 4 people. During its roughly one-year operational cycle, it generated approximately $90 million in fee revenue, of which $44.67 million was distributed to creators, with the remainder going to the Friend.tech team.
After Friend.tech launched its token in May 2024, the FRIEND token once reached a historical high of around $3.2, and its price upon listing on major centralized exchanges (CEXs) also remained around $2.
The rest of the story is well-known—the unsuccessful V2 update, founder Racer hinting at disagreements with Base and plans to migrate the project, the team continuously dumping tokens, and the team openly stating they were relinquishing control of the project's contract.
In less than a year, Friend.tech, with a lifespan considered relatively long within the industry, completed its journey from explosive popularity to gradual silence.
Christian, the founder of Infini mentioned at the beginning, might be "the last major player in Friend.tech." According to his own account, not counting previous expenses on purchasing various room Keys, the 3 million FRIEND tokens held in his account alone were worth $7 million at the peak. Calculated at the current price of around $0.004, this asset has now shrunk to $10,000.
In this wave of SocialFi frenzy ignited by Friend.tech, Christian is not the only one heartbroken. After the FRIEND token launch, Machi Big Player, a major product user, was also one of Friend.tech's "die-hard fans." Between May 3 and June 8, 2024, he spent a cumulative 4,975 ETH (worth approximately $15.6 million) to purchase 8.6 million FRIEND at an average price of $1.81. However, within a month of the token's launch, the FRIEND price had already fallen below $0.01, resulting in a loss of over $14 million for Machi at that time. Two months later, the "nostalgic" Machi continued to buy FRIEND tokens, further expanding his losses to over $15 million.
On November 26, 2024, Friend.tech founder Racer's X account @0xRacerAlt was completely deleted (The current holder of this ID cannot be verified. Odaily reminds readers to be cautious of scams). This SocialFi product, once highly anticipated by the industry, has since completely vanished from the scene.
As for the series of clones like @tribedotrun, @TheArena, @tomo_social, although they also garnered temporary追捧, they ultimately met their demise on this one-way street of SocialFi.
According to Coingecko data, the FRIEND token's current market cap is only around $400,000. Compared to its peak market cap of $230 million, the decline exceeds 99.8%.
Further recommended reading:
Has the SocialFi "Narrative Failed"? Does Crypto Social Have a Future?
SocialFi Data Comparison: Friend.tech VS Farcaster, Who is the Social King?
The Final Chapter of NFTs and the Silent Swan Song of L2: The Dual Game of Blur and Blast
"Only those rich enough can afford to lose money."
Machi lost millions on Friend.tech and also took a big tumble on BLUR.
It's worth mentioning that as an NFT platform that raised $11 million in a seed round, Paradigm is also among the investors in Blur. When it comes to "cutting VC韭菜," although Paradigm is a top-tier "VC leader" in the industry, it still maintains a remarkably high presence rate. Furthermore, Paradigm was also the lead investor in the $20 million funding round for Blast, the L2 startup project by Blur founder pacman (Chinese name translated as Tieshun).
In February 2023, after enduring the crypto winter of 2022, Blur presented an "airdrop gift" to the NFT players still坚守 in the crypto camp—a total supply of 3 billion BLUR tokens, with 51% allocated to the community. Data later indicated that 23 addresses received over a million tokens in the airdrop.
Among them, the renowned NFT whale Machi was prominently listed—in the BLUR token airdrop, he claimed to have received nearly 1.85 million BLUR tokens and subsequently sold nearly 960,000 BLUR at a price of $0.62. (Odaily Note: This tweet has since been deleted)
In the subsequent price fluctuations, Machi still regarded BLUR as his "favorite": first continuously buying and accumulating, then repeatedly chasing rallies and selling on dips. Ultimately, around July 2023, he once deposited 18.4 million BLUR (worth $3.13 million) into Binance,当时预计亏损 $3.16 million; additionally, at that time he held 275 million BLAST, worth $4.45 million, with an unrealized loss of $1.5 million.
As time passed, the "NFT Holy Grail" and "L2 narrative" of Blur and Blast gradually faded. The continuous decline in token prices led more people to cry "scam." Although Blur later launched S2, S3, and other incentive campaigns, the massive airdrop gains from the S1 era were gone forever.
As for the一蹶不振 of previous NFT projects like BAYC (Yuga Labs), Moonbirds (Kevin Rose), CloneX (RKTF), it's even more difficult to summarize in a few words.
Currently, the official Blur account last updated in December 2025; as for the founder who "retired after success," pacman, his latest tweet is a recent message reminding everyone that "someone is impersonating him, beware of scams."
Perhaps this is Pacman's "farewell tweet"?
According to Coingecko data, BLUR is currently trading around $0.02, with a market cap of approximately $58 million. Compared to its all-time high price of $1.24, the decline is as high as 96.8%.
BLAST is currently trading around $0.00048, with a market cap of approximately $28 million. Its maximum historical decline is even higher, at 98.2%.
The Rise and Fall of the Inscription King: ORDI's Success and Failure Both Lie in Fairness
Compared to the "track innovation explosions" in the previous two sections, inscriptions represent a truly "pioneering track." As the "ancestor of inscriptions," ORDI evolved from a fairly launched inscription project to a "retail favorite" listed on Binance. It can indeed be said that its success and failure both lie in fairness.
From late 2022 to early 2023, Ordinals, promoting the concept of a "BTC ecosystem NFT protocol," quietly emerged but remained lukewarm. By February 2023, only thousands of such assets had been minted. However, as the asset class gained increasing attention, Ordinals NFTs rapidly grew to 13,000.
On February 15, the cumulative minting volume of the Bitcoin network NFT protocol Ordinals surpassed 100,000. Although Ordinals当时 caused Bitcoin network fees for Inscriptions to持续攀升, leading to the most severe mempool congestion since the FTX暴雷 and 3AC破产, its pioneering asset issuance model and skyrocketing prices still drove the market wild.
In March of that year, BTC ecosystem anonymous developer domo launched BRC-20 based on the Ordinals protocol. It functions as a specific JSON text file used for transactions, with the JSON file being the Ordinal inscription. The total token supply is 21 million. Early minting cost was only about $3 per inscription (containing 1000 tokens), representing a "heaven-sent opportunity" for those with敏锐嗅觉 and the手速 and技术 to跟上.
In May 2023, Ordinals inscription #5091133 containing 50,000 ORDI tokens was sold on Ordinals Wallet for 32 BTC, setting a record for the highest single transaction. Few could have predicted at the time that this transaction, worth $880,000 then, would turn into an astonishing fortune in the subsequent period.
During the same period, OKX Web3 Wallet announced the official launch of its BRC20/Ordinals marketplace, being the industry's first multi-chain wallet supporting Ordinals trading and the first wallet enabling BRC20 token trading on mobile. This also marked exchanges and public chains finding new growth points for trading activity during the industry寒冬.
In early May 2023, the ORDI token price officially broke through $10, with its market cap exceeding $220 million and holding addresses surpassing 5,200. This milestone rise further fueled ORDI's势如破竹—major CEXs纷纷跟进上线 ORDI. Within days, the ORDI price surged, breaking through $27, and the market cap of the BRC-20 sector tokens also approached $1 billion as expected.
However, as the ORDI price
