Telegram Game 'Farm Frens' Plots Migration to Line After Botched Base Token Airdrop

Popular Telegram game Farm Frens admitted to an error-filled launch of its FREN token on Ethereum layer-2 network Base earlier this week, sharing a number of next moves on the horizon as it aims to regain trust from players and investors.

Due to be claimable by eligible participants pursuant to its January 20 snapshot, the Farm Frens team had technical issues with all major components of the token generation event, or TGE. That includes problems with token allocations, claiming, and staking, plus its attempt at a novel mechanic called “Frensurance” which taxed transferred airdrop claims.

“Dear Frens, we fucked up,” the project posted on X (formerly known as Twitter). “We know many of you looked forward to our TGE, and we let you down.”

A full breakdown of the errors was detailed by pseudonymous project founder Kaizen, who gave the most attention to issues with token claims. Such problems hindered the ability for some unlucky users to receive their allocations. 

“Our team had thought it would be a good idea to subsidize gas fees for everyone’s airdrop claim,” he wrote. “Though we ran successful tests on our local nodes, we didn’t account for the fact that mainnet would be significantly slower than our tests."

"To our dismay, after we went live we realized users were getting claim errors, so we had to throttle: Some users got lucky, but others would fail," he added.

The project now believes that this issue—and another related to token balances not appearing after claim—have been rectified, offering a contact form to those who are still encountering issues claiming their FREN token.

“We deeply apologize for all the technical issues users faced when claiming,” the project founder continued. “Though several community members made comments suggesting that this was all intentional, I can assure you that it was not.” 

Farm Frens initially was going to drop its token on Base in January, but delayed the launch and sounded off on Telegram after the messaging app announced an exclusivity deal with The Open Network (TON) for crypto integrations. That move would require any games or mini apps built on Telegram to switch to TON or remove their blockchain functionality.

While TON operates independently from Telegram, the network was originally created within Telegram before the messaging firm dumped the project in 2020 amid regulatory scrutiny. Since late 2023, however, Telegram has become more closely aligned with the community-led TON.

At that time, Farm Frens reworked its roadmap, signaling its plans to create a standalone wallet and expand to other platforms—including the Line messaging app that is particularly popular in Japan. Its updated product roadmap includes the launch of a new season of in-game content when it launches on Line in Q2.

FREN is down 9% in the last 24 hours and currently sits at a $1.5 million market cap.

Edited by Andrew Hayward