Machi Big Brother’s $1M FRIEND Buyout Bid Triggers 1,350% Surge

A $1M Offer to Racer and Paradigm

FRIEND, the token of the once-hyped SocialFi platform Friend.tech, ripped more than 1,350% higher within 24 hours after Jeffrey Huang — the trader widely known as Machi Big Brother — publicly put a $1 million buyout offer on the table for the stalled Base-based DeFi app. In an X post dated August 27, Huang stated that FRIEND was trading at a market capitalization below $300,000 and offered $1 million directly to co-founder Racer and early backer Paradigm, proposing a community takeover (CTO) relaunch on the existing token contract at 0x0bd4887f7d41b35cd75dff9ffee2856106f86670. He later added that what he primarily wants is the project's X account and official web domain, with any restart built on the current $FRIEND contract rather than a new deployment.

X post dated August 27https://x.com/machibigbrother/status/2092826374843314213

The bid targets a token locked in a prolonged bear market. FRIEND peaked near $3.26 on May 3, 2024, and slid as low as $0.00002225 in July 2026. On-chain data shows Huang accumulated roughly 11 million FRIEND between May and August 2024 for about 5,200 ETH — approximately $16.7 million at the time — a stack worth only around $500,000 at the bottom, an unrealized loss exceeding $16 million. About five days before going public, he moved the entire 11 million tokens to a separate wallet and bought an additional 125,000 FRIEND; he says both addresses are his own and that no tokens were sold.

Thin liquidity did the rest. FRIEND briefly changed hands near $0.051, pushing market capitalization from under $300,000 to roughly $4.89 million on 24-hour volume of about $5.63 million, before easing to $0.0152 at the time of writing. As of publication, neither Racer nor Paradigm has confirmed the proposal or opened formal negotiations. In its 2023 prime, Friend.tech — where users bought X-account-linked Keys for private chats — once out-earned Ethereum in daily fees and racked up more than $80 million in cumulative revenue.

Bitget CFD Lifts Gold Leverage to 800x

Bitget, meanwhile, pushed in the opposite direction — deeper into traditional markets. The exchange announced a dynamic leverage mechanism and tiered margin management for its CFD desk, raising maximum leverage on XAUUSD (gold versus the US dollar) to 800x and on USDCNH (US dollar versus offshore renminbi) to 100x. The mechanics matter: initial margin is set at 0.125% for XAUUSD positions of up to 100,000 USDT — the effective 800x tier — and at 1% for USDCNH positions of up to 1,000,000 USDT, equivalent to 100x. Margin requirements then climb step by step as position size crosses each tier, and each band's rate applies only to the portion of the position inside it. Small tickets keep maximum capital efficiency; larger exposure is risk-managed progressively rather than forced out abruptly. CEO Gracy Chen framed the upgrade around how traders actually behave now: capital moves fluidly between crypto, commodities, foreign exchange and equity indices, and flexibility in deploying it matters most in markets like gold, where a single macro event can reprice activity within hours. The rollout extends a broader CFD buildout — new account modes, tighter copy-trading risk controls and deeper integration of traditional instruments into the exchange's universal account ecosystem. Per the exchange's official announcement, its CFD desk once cleared $8 billion in a single day during peak XAUUSD demand, a figure that explains why margin architecture has become a competitive front. For anyone comparing venues via our guide to the Best Crypto Exchanges, leverage design on metals and FX pairs — not just perpetual contracts on crypto — is emerging as a genuine differentiator, alongside access to assets like silver (XAG). Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

Racer and Paradigm Hold the Answer

Both developments, read side by side, describe a market where capital chases exhausted on-chain assets and crossover instruments at the same time. The primary record here is Huang's own X post — the offer, the sub-$300,000 market cap and the CTO plan are stated there verbatim — while Bitget's mechanism is documented in the exchange's official announcement. COINOTAG's read: FRIEND's spike is reflexive until Racer and Paradigm respond, and the September 2024 transfer of contract admin rights to a null address means even a completed buyout cannot recover control of the original protocol; a relaunch would mean brand, token and community rebuilt as a fresh on-chain DeFi product. Watch for a response from either party — continued silence likely fades the move.