Someone Bought Friendster for $30K in Bitcoin — And Turned It Into an Anti-Social-Media App
Someone Bought Friendster for $30K in Bitcoin — And Turned It Into an Anti-Social-Media AppThe social network that turned down Google’s $30 million offer just got resurrected by one dude with Bitcoin and a weird idea about touching phones.
Friendster — the OG social network that predates both MySpace AND Facebook — was just bought for $30,000, rebuilt from scratch, and relaunched as an iOS app where the ONLY way to add a friend is to physically tap your phone against theirs. In person. Like cavemen.
Google offered $30 million for Friendster in 2003. The founders said no. Now, 23 years later, someone grabbed it for 0.1% of that price and built the exact opposite of every social media app on your phone right now.
🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary
| Term | What It Actually Means |
|---|---|
| Friendster | The very first big social network. Think Facebook but from 2002, before Facebook existed. It had millions of users and then died. |
| NFC / Phone Tapping | That thing when you hold two phones close together and they talk to each other. Like paying with Apple Pay, but for adding friends. |
| Domain Squatting | Buying a website name just to sit on it and sell it later for more money. Like buying empty lots in a city before it booms. |
| Park.io | A tool that automatically grabs website names the second they expire. The buyer of Friendster created this tool and sold it. |
| App Store Guideline 4.2 | Apple’s rule that says “your app needs to do enough stuff to be worth listing.” Friendster almost got killed by this. |
🔍 The Backstory — How One Dude Bought a Dead Legend
Okay so here’s the thing. Friendster wasn’t some random app. It launched in 2002 — before MySpace (2003), before Facebook (2004), before everything. It hit 3 million users in its first few months. The founder was on magazine covers. Google literally showed up with $30 million in cash in 2003 and Friendster said “nah, we’re good.”
Spoiler: they were not good.
The site got slow, MySpace copied its best features in 10 days flat, and Facebook ate what was left. By 2010, Friendster sold its social media patents to Facebook for $40 million and basically vanished.
Fast forward to 2023. A guy named Mike Carson — who founded Park.io, a tool that auto-buys expiring domains — noticed friendster.com was alive again but just showing popup ads. He recognized the domain owner as one of his old customers, reached out, and bought the whole thing: domain + trademarks. Price? $20K in Bitcoin plus a domain that was pulling in ~$9K/year in ad revenue.
📊 The Numbers — Then vs Now
| What | Then (2003) | Now (2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase price offered | $30,000,000 (Google) | $30,000 (one guy with Bitcoin) |
| Users at peak | 115 million | Basically zero (just launched) |
| Revenue model | Ads everywhere | No ads. Period. |
| How you add friends | Click a button | Physically touch phones |
| Algorithmic feed | Didn’t exist yet | Deliberately removed |
| Platform | Desktop website | iOS only (Android coming) |
| Patent sale to Facebook | $40 million (2010) | N/A |
⚙️ What the New Friendster Actually Does
Here’s where it gets weird. And honestly? Kind of interesting.
The new Friendster is an iOS app where:
- The only way to add someone as a friend is to tap your phones together in person. No search. No suggestions. No “people you may know.” You either see them face-to-face or they don’t exist on your Friendster.
- No follower counts. Nobody can see how popular you are.
- No algorithmic feed. You see posts from your actual friends in order. That’s it.
- No ads. Carson says he doesn’t care about making money from it. He wants it to “eventually pay for itself.”
- If you don’t tap phones with a friend for a full year, your connection with them fades. Like a nudge that says “hey, maybe go see this person.”
Originally, you couldn’t even sign up unless someone already on Friendster tapped their phone against yours. Apple rejected that for being too niche (Guideline 4.2). So now anyone can sign up, but you still can’t actually connect with anyone without meeting them.
🗣️ What People Are Saying
The Hacker News thread is… divided.
The fans:
“The phone-tapping requirement is genius. It’s anti-spam, pro-privacy, and mimics how real friendships actually work.”
The haters:
“Only available on 20% of phones. Excludes everyone who’s homebound, rural, or just uses Android. This is the Bump app from 2010 with a famous name taped on.”
The domain skeptics:
“This is just sleazy domain squatting with extra steps. He’s littering for profit.”
The pragmatists:
“A domain making $9K a year should’ve been valued way higher. He got a steal and built something on top. That’s not squatting, that’s building.”
Multiple people reported they couldn’t even find the app in the App Store by searching “Friendster” — because paid ads for other apps were pushing it down. Which is… kind of poetic for a platform built on rejecting algorithms.
💡 Why This Actually Matters
This isn’t really about Friendster. It’s about something bigger happening right now.
People are tired. Genuinely, deeply tired of social media. Instagram is an ad platform that sometimes shows you your friends. Twitter/X is a political battleground owned by the world’s richest shitposter. TikTok might get banned or sold every other month. Facebook is where your aunt posts minion memes.
And here comes a guy saying: what if a social network only had people you’ve actually met? What if your feed wasn’t curated by an algorithm trying to make you angry enough to keep scrolling? What if the whole thing just… didn’t try to make money off you?
Is it going to work? Probably not at massive scale. But the fact that this idea is resonating with people tells you something about where we’re at with the internet right now.
Cool. A dead social network rose from the grave with a $30K Bitcoin transaction. Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
💰 Flip Dead Internet Brands Into Micro-Communities
Friendster isn’t the only dead legend. There are hundreds of forgotten internet brands — LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Vine (sort of), Ask.fm — with expired or cheaply available domains and leftover name recognition. The play? Grab a nostalgic domain, slap a modern twist on it (Discord bot, niche app, merch store), and ride the free press you get from “remember THIS?” headlines.
Example: A 24-year-old in Portugal bought the domain for a defunct early-2000s forum for €400, turned it into a Discord community for retro web design, hit 8,000 members in 3 months, and now makes €1,200/month from a Patreon tier where he teaches CSS from that era.
Timeline: Domain purchase to first revenue: 6-10 weeks if you already have a community angle ready.
📱 Build 'Proof-of-Presence' Features for Local Businesses
The phone-tapping thing sounds goofy until you realize every local business owner is desperate for foot traffic verification. Coffee shops, gyms, pop-up markets — they all want proof that people actually showed up, not just clicked an ad. Build a white-label “tap to check in” tool using NFC on iOS/Android that gives businesses real attendance data and gives customers rewards. This is what Foursquare tried to be but with actual hardware verification.
Example: A dev duo in Bangkok built a Shopify plugin that uses NFC phone taps for in-store loyalty points. Three bubble tea chains adopted it within a month. They charge 2,000 THB (~$55) per location per month. 40 locations = $2,200/month.
🔧 Create 'Social Media Detox' Kits and Sell the Lifestyle
Friendster’s whole pitch is “social media but less.” That’s not a feature — it’s a movement. Package the anti-algorithm, anti-feed lifestyle into a sellable thing. A Notion template that replaces your social feeds with a personal CRM for real friendships. A printable “friendship audit” worksheet. A 7-day challenge email course. Sell it on Gumroad for $9-$15. The target audience is parents, burned-out millennials, and anyone who’s googled “how to quit Instagram.”
Example: A therapist in Melbourne created a “Digital Friendship Reset” Notion template pack after reading about Friendster’s relaunch. Posted it on Twitter with the hook “Friendster had it right.” 340 sales at $12 AUD each in the first two weeks = ~$2,700 USD.
🧠 Arbitrage Between 'Dead' Trademarks and Living Nostalgia
Here’s the sneaky one. Mike Carson didn’t just buy a domain — he got the trademarks too. There are thousands of abandoned trademarks for brands people still remember. Check the USPTO trademark database for dead/expired marks in classes you care about (clothing, apps, food). If nobody’s using the mark, you can file a new application and own a brand name that already has recognition baked in. Then sell merch, launch a product, or license the name.
Example: A streetwear guy in Lagos found that the trademark for a popular 2000s sneaker brand had lapsed. Filed for it (~$250 through Trademarkia), started selling t-shirts with the retro logo on Shopify. First batch of 200 shirts sold out in a week at $28 each. Nostalgia is a cheat code.
🛠️ Follow-Up Actions
| Want To… | Do This |
|---|---|
| Search dead brand domains | Browse ExpiredDomains.net filtered by age + backlinks |
| Check abandoned trademarks | Search USPTO TESS for “dead” status marks in your niche |
| Build NFC features quickly | Start with Apple’s Core NFC docs or the react-native-nfc-manager library |
| Sell digital detox products | List on Gumroad or Lemonsqueezy — zero upfront cost |
| Study how Friendster’s app works | Download it from the App Store and reverse-engineer the UX |
Quick Hits
| Want To… | Do This |
|---|---|
| Try the new Friendster |
Download on iOS — it’s free, no ads |
 Read the full story |
Mike Carson’s original Medium post |
 See what devs think |
Hacker News discussion — 200+ comments |
 Learn the OG Friendster history |
Wikipedia deep dive — includes the Google offer drama |
 Hunt your own dead brand |
ExpiredDomains.net + USPTO trademark search |
Google offered $30 million. One guy paid $30 thousand. Sometimes the best comeback story is the one nobody asked for.
!