FriendsWithYou (FWY) is an art collaboration founded in 2002 and based in Los Angeles by Samuel Albert Borkson and Arturo Sandoval.
FriendsWithYou’s mission coincides with their motto “Magic, Luck, and Friendship.”
FRIENDSIES
On March 23, 2021, FriendsWithYou and Diplo partnered to release Non-fungible tokens on Nifty Gateway.
Friendsies was launched last April via a Dutch auction mint that started at 3.33 ETH, or around $11,450 on the date of the mint and they released a collection of 10,000 Non-fungible tokens.
First the price was gradually decreasing owing to the minting process but the mint ultimately generated $5.3 million worth of ETH.
Friendsies has generated about $15 million worth of total trading volume to date. Also 7.5% royalty fee attached to each NFT sale, that means Friendsies earned another $1.125 million from those sales.
Pause?
On February 21st the NFT which raised over $5 million unexpectedly announced that they are about to take a pause in all their nft activities via Twitter and they even abandoned their twitter account temporarily.
This drama created a suspicion in the minds of the community which saw Friendsies as a trustworthy NFT network.
The community rumored that it might be a rug pull where the initial investors run away with all the money after accumulating enough funds through trade practices.
Reaction of the community
According to the Friendsies team, “the volatility and challenges of the market” complicated the project’s progress, so they decided to set it aside while the space continued to mature. They also thanked everyone who was on this journey and asked to have belief in them.
But how do people believe after such malicious activities with such a sounding note?
Here’s how people reacted…
Satvik Sethi, CEO of Joincircle, a social app focused on Web3 and former NFT product chief for Mastercard, spoke out on Twitter saying,
“Making a public offer to take over Friendsies. I’ll install a new team and take the project forward with a different vision
The IP has so much potential and the holders deserve better. We just cannot keep letting stuff like this slide because it really is hurting the space.”
He made a public offer to the takeover of the company assuming that they are in a situation where they can’t take this network forward.
Of course that’s what we too thought from these expressions.
Amidst all these rumors and assumptions or even we call it misunderstandings this was the major takeaway.
Friendsies react…
So seeing the responses and misunderstandings of the community.
And it was clear if this trust is kept on breaking then there will be no trust among the community and it will be difficult for the network to move forward in achieving its vision.
And so the Friendsies company reacts back through their tweets.
They mentioned that they have no will to rug pull and they also mentioned that their website and twitter account were attacked which made them to disappear temporarily.
There is a lot of uncertainty in the market at this moment. Will Friendsies become the first NFT rug pull of 2023 Or will it move forward even after all these dramas and be successful? or will they accept Sethi’s offer? Right now, the only ones with the answer are the developers who have remained quiet for long.
