What’s happening on Friendsies? The kindness-themed NFT project, spearheaded by FriendsWithYou founders Samuel Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, raised some major eyebrows in the Web3 community on February 21 when they tweeted that they would be putting “a pause on Friendsies and all future digital products for the time being”. Specifically, they cited market volatility and the inability to deliver the project on schedule as reasons for the pause.
Without further explanation, the team deleted the Friendsies Twitter account. From rug theft accusations to a public offer to take over Frendsies, we dive into everything that happened below and offer some additional insight from a well-known collector in the NFT space familiar with the team.
a pregnant pause
Following the tweet, rumors of a rug removal immediately began circulating, with some concerned that the $5.3 million the project raised in its April 2022 minting had not yet been reinvested in Friendsies and their community as promised. . Also, part of the project roadmap, as described by himself chain detective ZachXBT – included a P2E game similar to Tomogatchi, community treasury, and a royalty program that had yet to materialize.
When the official FriendsWithYou website also went dark after the announcement, it only served to fuel these concerns (the website is back at the time of writing). However, in a quick turn of events, the Friendsies team reactivated his Twitter account just hours after the initial announcement, he tweeted that the founders simply wanted to “pause social media engagement” and were not putting a pause on the project itself. He The Friendsies team claimed that their Twitter and website had been overwhelmed with hate and threats in an apparent attack on them and the project.
Whatever the truth behind the situation, the community won’t have to wait long for the full explanation. NFT collector consumables are housing a twitter space on February 22 at 3 pm ET in which Borkson and Sandoval will make an appearance and answer questions. But it may be too little, too late.
These latest developments are allegedly part of a larger pattern of missteps and inadequate planning by the FriendsWithYou leadership team. Speaking to nft now in the background, a well-known collector in the NFT space described his experience in the FriendsWithYou community as markedly disappointing. The collector had purchased a Friendsies NFT which, as part of a March 2022 auction with Christie’s, came with a painted bronze sculpture counterpart. However, after being informed by the Friendsies team that he would have to pay an additional $8,000 to $12,000 to ship the statue, the holder refused and subsequently had to return the NFT. They were refunded 45 percent of their total NFT investment, taking a significant loss in the process.
As an added concern, the anonymous source and others in the space have noted wallet activity which saw much of the ETH that the project wallet had accumulated in its mint exchanged for USDC and removed from the ecosystem.
community sentiment
No matter what happens in the world of FriendsWithYou, people are not impressed. While the Friendsies team defended the need to be transparent in their most recent Twitter update, the Web3 community has not failed to note that removing the Twitter account from the project after making an ambiguous announcement about its future is a strange way to encourage transparency.
Members of the Web3 community are also not particularly thrilled that FriendsWithYou has blocked several twitter accounts who criticized or reported the project pause (FriendsWithYou also blocked nft now after they informed about the announcement and subsequent deletion of the Friendsies Twitter account).
While some community members focus on these shortcomings, others see an opportunity. In a move reminiscent of the Pixelmon and Pudgy Penguins lead changes, artist and former Mastercard Web3 Lead Satvik Sethi offered to buy the Friendsies project shortly after the initial announcement, saying that the community deserved better and that the intellectual property had too much potential to go to waste.
Incompetence or bad intention?
While the entire Web3 community has a particularly fine-tuned radar for malicious actors at the moment, it’s possible that the recent revelations about Friendsies’ mismanagement are just that: incompetence, not malice.
Given the random nature of how the FriendsWithYou team handled the delivery and refund of sculptures from holders, and recent inconsistencies in the way they communicated changes to their community, Friendsies’ issues could simply be the result of a misunderstanding. unsteady hand in command. After all, the team may end up owing more taxes on their mint profits than they can now cover.
The Friendsies NFT drop was announced as a set of customizable NFTs that act as virtual companions for their owners that FriendsWithYou planned to make interactive in the metaverse. Borkson and Sandoval called them a “personal augmented reality friend” and “a digital partner for life” while speaking with nft now in March 2022 (full disclosure, nft now engaged in a raffle with Friendsies in the same month). All of the project activity was largely expressed in the narrative that Borkson and Sandoval have long articulated: empathy, camaraderie, and making the world a better place. Supposedly, the ideas of unity and goodness are woven into its DNA and the vision of its creators.
It cannot be ignored that recent events surrounding the FriendsWithYou universe become even more apparent through the lens of that thematic base. Borkson and Sandoval have been active in the community for months, promoting every value that Web3 represents to its fullest. But your team will have to take some heat if you want to maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the community.
“Together, we are the creators of a new world”, says FriendsWithYou Golden Cloud Club membership page. “We, the architects of a new society, commit ourselves to uphold the [principles] of empathy and compassion for others and for our living planet.” Those principles are now being put to the test, and whatever the FriendsWithYou team decides to do for the foreseeable future, the entire Web3 community will hold them to their own level. That’s not bullying; that is responsibility.