MT Capital Research Report: Fren Pet, A Mining Machine Game in Pet's Clothing
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MT Capital Research Report: Fren Pet, A Mining Machine Game in Pet's Clothing
Base and Fren Pet elevate each other, and more FrenX projects are expected to go viral on Base in the future.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Severin
TL;DR
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A Fren Pet is essentially a mining machine that continuously earns a portion of all in-game players’ spending as revenue.
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Compared to friend.tech, Fren Pet has implemented more features aimed at product longevity and user retention. However, its wealth-generation effect is significantly weaker than friend.tech’s, which could become a growth bottleneck.
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Base and Fren Pet reinforce each other. We expect more FrenX-style applications to emerge and go viral on Base in the future.
On November 17, an official tweet from Base about Fren Pet quickly ignited the community, drawing waves of users into this on-chain virtual pet game. A myth around wealth generation through virtual pet gaming had quietly begun.
Core Gameplay Overview
In Fren Pet, players must first spend 100 $FP to mint a virtual pet. Then, they need to purchase various types of food using $FP from the in-game store to reset their pet's death timer, prevent it from dying, and increase its score. Each pet gets one free spin of a prize wheel daily, with chances to earn points, shields, insurance, or nothing at all. Every 15 minutes, a pet can also harass another pet, succeeding with a 40% probability and stealing 0.5% of the loser’s points. Additionally, players can participate in dice games for higher risk and potentially greater point rewards. Finally, a pet’s accumulated points determine its share of the ETH reward pool. Claiming the reward resets the pet’s score to zero, ending the game.
Fren Pet’s FOMO Design
From gameplay mechanics and UI design to user interaction experience and server performance, Fren Pet cannot be considered a high-quality game—in fact, it borders on being poorly made. After Base’s official tweet, the surge in traffic overwhelmed Fren Pet’s servers, causing service interruptions. Currently, Fren Pet primarily relies on its FOMO-driven design to attract new players.
source:https://twitter.com/frenpetonbase
Game Mechanics:
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Not Free to Play, But Effectively Free to Play: To play Fren Pet, users must spend 100 $FP to mint a pet. However, whenever a new player mints a pet, the previous player’s 100 $FP minting cost is refunded. From a token ($FP) perspective, this is effectively “Free to Play.” But from a USD-value standpoint, as long as new players keep joining and spending within the game, the price of $FP is expected to rise—turning minting into a profit-making opportunity, essentially “Give to Play.” This increases user participation, encourages existing players to mint more pets, and motivates new users to join. (Note: The system has since been updated—minting now only costs 10 $FP, and these tokens go into a multi-sig contract that distributes them to long-term active players, promoting user retention.)
source: DEXTools
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Encouraging frequent, high-value spending to expand economic inflows: Food items have two attributes—survival duration and point yield. Generally, the more expensive the food, the higher the point gain—but the shorter the survival time. Players must balance between longevity and reward efficiency. Since points directly affect payout size, players aiming for maximum ETH rewards are incentivized to buy costly, high-yield food despite its short lifespan. This forces high-reward seekers to frequently repurchase premium food, generating substantial revenue for the game. As investment accumulates, players face increasing pressure to keep buying food to avoid losing their sunk costs. The design limiting food effects to just 2–3 days maximizes user engagement frequency and strengthens retention.
- Providing low-cost future reward expectations to drive positive social sharing: Each pet gets one free daily spin on a prize wheel, offering rewards ranging from 1 point to 2,000 points, special items like shields, or nothing. This free lottery gives users a low-cost chance at future gains, leveraging the psychological appeal of gambling to boost repeated engagement. Moreover, when users win big, they’re likely to share on social media, creating organic viral exposure and attracting new traffic to Fren Pet.
source: Fren Pet
- Leveraging user gambling tendencies to enrich gameplay and improve stickiness: Every 15 minutes, a pet can attack another, winning with a 40% success rate and claiming 0.5% of the loser’s points. This mechanic appeals to risk-takers who repeatedly launch attacks to steal points. More cautious players may instead focus on boosting their own scores to passively earn points from failed attackers due to higher defense stats. Additionally, Fren Pet introduced a dice game where players pay a 100 $FP entry fee for a chance to win up to 500 $FP.
source: Fren Pet
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Claiming rewards resets score to zero, discouraging dump-and-run behavior: Ponzi-like models fear early adopters cashing out too quickly. In Fren Pet, once a player claims their reward, their pet’s score resets to zero. This mechanism encourages players seeking long-term returns to delay claiming rewards, keeping them engaged longer and mitigating economic damage caused by mass withdrawals.
Tokenomics:
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Referral commissions encourage self-promotion: Similar to exchange referral programs, 10% of every $FP spent by a referred user is automatically sent to the referrer. This incentivizes players to actively promote their Fren Pet referral codes and earn passive income from others’ spending.
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Burn mechanics create deflationary expectations: The total supply of $FP is capped, and 90% of all $FP used in-game is permanently burned. This creates strong deflationary expectations, encouraging users to buy and hold $FP earlier.
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Reward redistribution fuels future return expectations: A 5% tax applies to all $FP trades on BaseSwap. When the smart contract collects 1,000 $FP via taxes, it automatically converts them into ETH, distributing 2% proportionally among top scorers, 2% to developers, and 1% back to the $FP liquidity pool. The 2% distributed to players acts as a forward-looking incentive, motivating continued gameplay.
source:https://dune.com/whale_hunter/fren-pet
The FOMO-driven mechanics and tokenomic design have drawn increasing numbers of players into Fren Pet. However, this game is unlikely to last indefinitely. The motivation driving players isn’t gameplay quality, but rather expectations of future returns. In essence, a Fren Pet functions like a mining rig, continuously earning a cut of all players’ in-game expenditures. When expected returns decline, rational players will begin to exit, triggering a vicious cycle: player loss → reduced $FP trading activity → lower redistributed rewards → further declines in expected returns → accelerated player attrition. Without compelling gameplay to sustain ongoing spending or positive external economic inputs, Fren Pet is destined for an abrupt end.
Comparison with Friend.tech
Fren Pet shares many similarities with friend.tech—even the names are clearly related. Both fundamentally rely on users’ expectations of future earnings, using social virality to encourage self-promotion, spark community-wide FOMO, and attract massive new user inflows. Early entrants benefit from lower initial costs and stand to gain outsized future returns as newer players enter and push values upward, thus improving user retention.
The key difference is that Fren Pet, built around a gaming context, incorporates unique design elements to enhance product longevity and user retention. For example, the pet feeding mechanism drives continuous spending, ensuring sustained revenue flow. Daily prize wheels and 15-minute attack intervals encourage frequent interactions, strengthening engagement. The reward claim = score reset rule delays early exits.
However, the pet-raising model also somewhat limits Fren Pet’s wealth-generation virality. Unlike friend.tech’s bonding curve, where simple Key trades reflect dramatic price swings instantly, Fren Pet’s point accumulation and reward stacking require time. Thus, users struggle to accumulate significant wealth quickly. This may result in less compelling narratives and weaker appeal, becoming a potential growth hurdle. Therefore, we anticipate that Fren Pet won’t attract massive user inflows as rapidly as friend.tech did through exaggerated wealth effects, nor will it suffer sudden collapses due to early dumping enabled by bonding curve designs. Instead, Fren Pet is more likely to remain in a lukewarm, steady state over time.
Base Needs More Fren Pets
Fren Pet’s breakout success owes much to Base’s retweet. In reality, Base and Fren Pet mutually benefit each other—Fren Pet needs Base for visibility and FOMO amplification, while Base needs more apps like Fren Pet to bring capital, traffic, real users, and revenue to its chain.
Like friend.tech, Fren Pet operates under different use cases—gaming versus social—but both leverage user expectations of future returns to drive high-frequency interactions and transactions. This fosters a more vibrant on-chain ecosystem and accelerates Base’s gas revenue growth. At its peak, friend.tech alone accounted for nearly half of Base’s daily gas consumption. Compared to friend.tech’s relatively simple Key trading, Fren Pet offers richer, high-frequency in-game actions such as feeding and attacking, leading users to incur more frequent gas fees—real revenue for Base.
source:https://dune.com/whale_hunter/fren-pet
As L2s grow increasingly homogeneous, Base has carved out a unique path by directing attention toward breakout apps, capturing large volumes of active users. We expect more FrenX-style applications—characterized by FOMO dynamics and high-frequency interactions—to emerge on Base, continuously injecting fresh vitality into its ecosystem. While these FrenX apps may not generate massive personal wealth for users, Base itself stands to gain substantial real revenue as the ultimate beneficiary.
MT Capital
MT Capital is headquartered in Silicon Valley and is a crypto-native fund focused on Web3 and related technologies. With a global team and diverse cultural perspectives, we possess deep insights into global markets and the ability to identify regional investment opportunities. MT Capital aims to become a leading blockchain investment firm, dedicated to supporting early-stage technology ventures capable of generating significant value. Since 2016, our portfolio has spanned infrastructure, L1/L2, DeFi, NFT, GameFi, and beyond. We are not just investors—we are strategic partners empowering founding teams.
Website: https://mt.capital/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MTCapital_US
Medium: https://medium.com/@MTCapital_US
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