Solana Opens First Physical Store in New York City

A Solana store opened in New York City today; it’s the first crypto store of its kind.

A Physical Web3 Store

Solana has opened a store in the real world.

Solana Spaces announced today the grand opening of its first store, situated at 20 Hudson Yards in New York City. The store, a collaborative effort from the Solana Foundation and several ecosystem partners, will be open from 10am to 8pm from Monday to Saturday and from 11am to 7pm on Sunday.

Catering to blockchain beginners, the store claims to be “the world’s first retail [and] educational space dedicated to Web3.” Visitors will have access to tutorials, programming services and Solana-based on-chain experiences; they will also have the opportunity to receive “unique rewards” for participating in physical store activities. 

With a market capitalization north of $14.5 billion and more than $2.6 billion of value locked across its protocols, Solana is one of crypto’s most prominent blockchains. It distinguishes itself from other smart contract-enabled blockchains like Ethereum by its high throughput capacity and very low fees, though the blockchain has been criticized for halting on many occasions.

A seed phrase booth will allow customers to generate their own Solana Phantom wallets. Multiple NFTs and cryptocurrencies including USDC are unlockable for visitors that go through the offered educational courses on Solana projects. 

The store will also feature interactive art installations, a display of Solana’s upcoming Saga phone, crypto “lifestyle” products such as hoodies and T-shirts, and several of the ecosystem’s NFT collections. The store also offers a 50% discount off of purchases up to $200 if using the Solana Pay app, and plans to rotate the experiences available to visitors.

While the Hudson Yards store is the only one currently announced, a later Twitter post from the official Solana account hinted that other plans (such as additional physical locations) were also in the works.

Solana Spaces will be the first store of its kind for the crypto space, which up until now has generally favored digital products over physical ones. Other ventures into the physical include a Solana-branded smartphone which the company announced last month. Such developments hint at a broader strategy to expand the Solana brand in the real world as well as the digital. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.