Friendsies NFT Collection Rug Pulled After Raising $5 Million

  • Friendsies founders have abruptly shut down the NFT collection and all associated projects. 
  • The rug pull was confirmed after the project’s Twitter account was deleted.
  • The collection had raised $5 million at Christie’s auction on OpenSea less than a year ago. 
  • Founders of the NFT collection blamed their decision to shut down on volatility and challenges in the market. 

Founders of the Friendsies (fRiENDSiES) NFT collection have pulled the rug on the project. The rug pull, which was announced on the project’s official Twitter account earlier today, comes less than a year after the Ethereum-based collection raised a whopping $5 million at an auction hosted by popular auction house Christie’s on OpenSea. 

Friendsies founders blame market volatility for pulling the rug

In a now-deleted Twitter thread, the founders of Friendsies blamed the volatility and challenges of the crypto market for their decision to pull the rug. They claimed that the current market conditions prevented them from developing the project in a way that they could be “proud of”. 

For now, we have decided that it’s best to allow the space to further mature. The fRiENDSiES IP is important to the team and we will be waiting for the right time and opportunities to see the full vision become reality.”

I was quite outspoken about friendsies.

Dutch Auction except they didn’t sell it at the lowest price for everybody. Started at 4.2eth and quite a few ppl paid absurd prices like this.

Then after raking in millions they collected royalties for months until rugging yesterday.

gg pic.twitter.com/Gu3as5hhf3

The early signs of trouble emerged when community members started alleging last year that the project’s founders had turned their back on the roadmap that was initially laid out. According to on-chain sleuth ZackXBT, there have been no announcements from the project since September 2022. Furthermore, several aspects of the roadmap, including a community treasury and a play-to-earn game, remain undelivered. 

ZachXBT further revealed that the founders of the project had not distributed 1.25% of all royalties (47 ETH) to holders, as claimed in the project’s official Discord server in March 2022. The rug pull has caused uproar in the NFT community on Twitter, with many victims calling out the crypto influencers who aggressively promoted the Friendsies collection last year. 

Mastercard Product Lead Satvik Sethi has publicly offered to take over Friendsies. According to him, the project’s IP has good potential and by installing a new team and leading with a different vision, the holders could be made whole. 

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