What's Driving Token Prices? September 11, 2024

FRIEND (-27%) - This week, socialFi application friend.tech effectively shut down, with the founders and the team supposedly nabbing $40M in the process. We’ve discussed friend.tech and its wavering roadmap in the past (remember friendchain?), but it seems the team has given up on the project entirely this time as they transferred the smart contracts to a null address, essentially revoking the ability to make changes to the protocol ever again. The move has many in the community infuriated (rightfully so), as the project netted about $80M in fees since launching over a year ago with half of these fees going to the development team. Meanwhile, holders of the FRIEND token are down -99% since launch and saw the token dip -30% on this announcement. There does not appear to be much recourse for tokenholders.
EUL (-15%) - Defi lend/borrow product Euler Finance launched its v2 this past week, which builds upon its current product suite and offers even more options for users to structure their loans and manage their risks. The new version supports multiple types of lending (overcollateralized, isolated pools, fixed and variable rates) and will support any type of asset as collateral (crypto, RWAs, NFTs, etc). This v2 is technically a relaunch after the original v2 was exploited in March of 2023 for $197M. The team, however, underwent an extensive audit process in preparation for the new launch, including 31 audits by 13 different firms and a $1.25M code audit competition, which is the largest audit to-date in crypto.
ENS (+1.6%) - Yesterday, Ethereum Name Service which provides Ethereum domain names to be used in place of wallet addresses, announced that ENS names could now be used on Venmo and PayPay. The integration is fairly simple for users: instead of entering a public key when sending crypto to either platform, a user can instead use someone’s ENS. The partnership furthers the bridging of Web2 and Web3 financial products and will hopefully broaden crypto exposure.
ATOM (+2.1%) - Interoperability Layer-1 protocol Cosmos has faced a turbulent few weeks following a governance proposal titled “Declaration of No Confidence in the Interchain Foundation (ICF) Leadership: A Call to Action.” The proposal called for financial audits of ICF’s spending over the past 6 years. The proposal was born out of frustration within the community as Cosmos has failed to meaningfully grow marketshare and the ATOM token has gone largely forgotten. The proposal which ultimately passed (although 46% of the voters abstained) did ignite action as the ICF published a monthly treasury snapshot for the first time ever and has promised to provide more frequent updates.

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