This Week on Crypto Twitter: Friend.tech Peaces Out, Trump Teases World Liberty Project

Illustration by Mitchell Preffer for Decrypt

Degens had plenty to sink their teeth into last week on Crypto Twitter, with surprise developments emerging from numerous high-profile projects in the space. 

At the top of the week, Friend.tech, the once-red-hot decentralized social network with financial incentives, announced that development of the project had effectively ceased after months of flagging momentum.

Backlash to the announcement was swift, given the tens of millions of dollars raked in by the so-called “SocialFi” experiment over its brief history—and the stigma in crypto against abandoning projects. 

Friend.tech’s team later came back online to clarify that the project wasn’t shutting down and would remain functional. But many degens didn’t care. The creators were splitting, and that was the only signal they cared about.

Meanwhile, over on the national political stage, crypto enthusiasts once again appeared to overestimate their influence during a week that was dominated by former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris’ first and likely only live presidential debate. 

Crypto lobbyists and fundraisers pushed hard to get a crypto-related question featured by ABC in the televised event, but their demands went unheeded. Neither crypto nor Bitcoin was mentioned once during the 90-minute session.

That result—while perhaps not unexpected—appeared to surprise degens, who waged nearly a million dollars on crypto betting site Polymarket over whether digital assets would be discussed during the high-stakes showdown. 

But they would not be disappointed for long. On Thursday, two days after the debate, Trump announced that his family’s long-rumored DeFi project, World Liberty Financial, will launch on Monday via a Twitter Spaces event co-hosted by Rug Radio, Decrypt’s sister company. 

In the teaser, Trump said that the project will “embrace the future with crypto, and [leave] the slow and outdated big banks behind,” a framing that some—including crypto attorney Gabe Shapiro, who previously advised the project—noted would be unthinkable coming from the former president just months ago. 

As to be expected on CT, though, even among those supportive of Trump’s embrace of crypto, there were qualms. 

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.