Machi Big Brother Rescinds $1M Friend.tech (FRIEND) Buyout Offer After 9 Days

Machi Big Brother Drops $1M Bid

Digital-asset investor Machi Big Brother, whose real name is Jeffrey Huang, has withdrawn the $1 million acquisition offer he tabled for Web3 social platform Friend.tech (FRIEND) just nine days after making it. The reversal came in a September 5 post on X in which Huang speculated that his offer was being blocked by venture capital firm Paradigm — a claim he presented as a guess, with no supporting evidence — and rescinded the bid. In the same message he pivoted: instead of abandoning the project, he urged Friend.tech co-founder Racer to relaunch the application on Robinhood Chain, promising his support for such a move. The original offer, submitted on August 27, was narrow in scope: it sought only the project's X account and its website domain, not the underlying code or community. That mattered because the original development team gave up control of Friend.tech's smart contracts in September 2024, leaving it unclear what rights any buyer would actually have acquired through the deal. Friend.tech itself launched on Base in 2023 as a social application that let users buy and sell shares in one another, and Paradigm led the startup's seed funding round that same year. Huang carries deep personal exposure to the token he was bidding on: he purchased 11 million FRIEND for roughly 5,200 ETH, and that position has since recorded losses exceeding $16 million — a personal speculative bet rather than a MicroStrategy-style deliberate treasury accumulation.

September 5 post on Xhttps://x.com/machibigbrother/status/2096208757097472361?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

FRIEND Holds Gains as Robinhood Chain Emerges

Despite the collapse of the buyout, the FRIEND token has kept its footing. Market data puts the token near $0.0069, up roughly 5% over the past 24 hours, giving it a market capitalization of about $659,000 based on its circulating supply — a fraction of the roughly $4.89 million peak reached during August's rally, though the token still holds a 382% gain across 90 days, per CoinGecko price data. Traders repositioning around the news have been working across the standard order types, with the bid withdrawal failing to trigger the selloff some expected. Huang's suggested destination for a revival, Robinhood Chain, launched on July 1 as an Arbitrum-based layer-2 network. On-chain data shows its decentralized-exchange volume has surpassed Ethereum's since launch, driven largely by memecoin flows — the same consumer-grade retail lane targeted by intent-centric infrastructure such as dappOS. Not everyone views that mix favorably: analyst Jon Ma of Artemis has warned that Robinhood Chain's memecoin boom could undermine the exchange's ambitions in tokenized stocks. As of publication, Racer has not publicly responded to Huang's relaunch proposal. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bybit.

Racer's Answer Decides Friend.tech's Fate

COINOTAG's read: the primary record here is Huang's own X post, and it should be treated carefully — the Paradigm-block claim is explicit speculation, not confirmation, and no evidence has been offered. What the episode really illustrates is how a dormant social-fi project's valuation now hangs on personality-driven dealmaking and a new retail venue rather than on any transferable asset, given the 2024 surrender of smart-contract control. FRIEND's resilience near $0.0069 suggests the market is pricing the hope of a Racer-led relaunch, not the buyout that failed.