Friends, one Ethereum The NFT project from long-running art duo FriendsWithYou announced today that it would “pause” all future plans around the project after raising more than $5 million in ETH in last year’s mint. The team apparently deleted its Twitter account shortly after, leading to accusations of a “rug pull”.
Now some members of the community are proposing a plan to take over and continue to run the project.
“As project founders, we have decided that it is best to take a break [Friendsies] and all future digital goods for the time being,” the since-deleted tweet thread read.
FriendsWithYou, a collaboration between artists Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, started in 2002 and has exhibited in many museums and galleries around the world. The project has also released toys and collaborated on a Netflix cartoon series. Friends With You’s official website is also apparently down, as of this writing, though Friendsies’ website is live.
Friendsies launched last April via a Dutch auction coin that started at 3.33 ETH, or around $11,450 on the mint date. The price fell steadily during the minting process for the 10,000 NFTsbut the coin eventually generated $5.3 million worth of ETH, according to the pseudonymous chain scout ZachXBT. It is unclear if the funds were used, and if so how.
Each original Friendsies avatar, which featured the duo’s colorful cartoon style, served as an access pass to a community that would grant holders a Tamagotchi-style digital pet toy. Furthermore, the creators said that NFT holders would receive a share of the project’s creator royalties from secondary market sales. Apparently, none of that happened.
“We had the best intentions to become a true digital companion for the future,” the creators tweeted today. “The volatility and challenges in the market have made it very difficult to move this project forward in a way we can be proud of. For now, we’ve decided it’s best to let the space mature further.”
Decrypt contacted FriendsWithYou but did not receive an immediate response.
Society reacts
Satvik Sethi, former NFT product manager for Mastercard and now CEO of Web3 social app startup Joincircle, tweeted at FriendsWithYou today with an offer to help the community take over the project from the original creators and keep it alive. Other Web3 founders, creators and collectors have responded, volunteering to help Sethi execute a new vision for Friendsies.
“I will install a new team and take the project forward with a different vision,” he wrote in the tweet thread, imploring FriendsWithYou to “do the right thing” and “not abandon the people who put their trust in you.”
Sethi plans to send a formal pitch to the artists and try to find a way forward for a project that currently has NFT holders and backers stuck in limbo. He told Decrypt that he is unsure whether the artists would consider such a pitch and grant him and others a license to continue the project using the FriendsWithYou IP.
Because Ethereum NFTs are composable assets, other developers can potentially build apps and experiences to support Friendsies’ NFTs, but likely won’t be able to actively use the artist’s IP without permission. still, Sethi believes there is enough momentum from fans and owners to revive the project and give it a new lease of life.
“I felt there was tremendous value behind the artwork and behind the community,” Sethi said. “There’s a lot of potential to flip this and use it in a cool new way.”
Sethi told Decrypt that the project founders had not made any announcements in the official Discord server since September ahead of today’s news, and apparently did not fulfill most of the promises surrounding the project.
He said that the project creators are currently not active on the Discord server after the announcement. Instead, NFT holders discuss potential ways forward among themselves, including ways to support community members or even pursue potential legal action over as-yet-unrealized promises.
Like many on Crypto Twitter today, Sethi described FriendsWithYou’s apparent move as a “carpet” or “carpet cover”— that is, the creators pulled the rug out from under paying backers by raising funds for the project after making significant promises.
“Plans change, don’t they? Even proof canceled their conference“, Sethi told Decrypt. “People realize new visions – you communicate and then you swing. But to say that we just put a pause in our plans and then delete the accounts and try to block all communication for it… that’s really a “blanket”. There’s no better way to say it.”
Friendsies NFTs now start at just 0.025 ETH (about $42) on the secondary marketplace OpenSea at the time of writing. According to data from CryptoSlam, Friendsies has generated around $15 million in total trading volume to date. With a flat 7.5% royalty fee attached to each NFT sale, that means Friendies earned an additional $1.125 million from those sales.
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