The popular Telegram game Farm Frens acknowledged an error-ridden launch of its FREN token on the Ethereum layer-2 network Base earlier this week, outlining several upcoming actions aimed at restoring trust among players and investors.
Set to be claimable by eligible participants following its January 20 snapshot, the Farm Frens team encountered technical difficulties with all major aspects of the token generation event (TGE). This included issues with token allocations, claiming, and staking, as well as its attempt at a novel mechanism called “Frensurance,” which imposed a tax on transferred airdrop claims.
“Dear Frens, we ****ed 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 comprehensive breakdown of the errors was provided by pseudonymous project founder Kaizen, who focused primarily on the problems with token claims. Such issues impeded the ability of some unfortunate 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 the mainnet would be significantly slower than our tests.”
“To our dismay, after we went live, we realized users were encountering 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 claims—have been resolved, offering a contact form for those still facing challenges in claiming their FREN token.
“We deeply apologize for all the technical issues users faced when claiming,” the project founder continued. “Though several community members suggested that this was all intentional, I can assure you that it was not.”
Farm Frens had initially planned to launch its token on Base in January but postponed the launch and expressed concerns on Telegram after the messaging app announced an exclusivity deal with The Open Network (TON) for crypto integrations. This agreement would require any games or mini-apps built on Telegram to either transition to TON or eliminate their blockchain functionality.
While TON operates independently from Telegram, the network was originally developed within Telegram before the messaging company abandoned the project in 2020 amid regulatory scrutiny. However, since late 2023, Telegram has become more closely aligned with the community-led TON.
At that time, Farm Frens revised its roadmap, indicating its intention to create a standalone wallet and expand to other platforms—including the Line messaging app, which 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 holds a market cap of $1.5 million.
Edited by Andrew Hayward