Solana Spaces to shut down NYC and Miami stores

• Solana Spaces shuts stores seven months after opening its first physical location.
• However, the company has already made plans to continue engaging with the community.

Solana Spaces, the Web3 onboarding experience that aimed to bring people to Solana through its retail stores, has announced that it will shut down its stores in New York and Miami by the end of February. In a recent tweet, the founder of Solana Spaces, Vibhu Norby, explained that the company has pivoted its Solana onboarding efforts into digital products like DRiP, which has attracted over 100,000 sign-ups.

The following is a note from our founder, @vibhu.

Dear @solanaspaces community,

We’ve made the difficult decision to sunset our stores in NYC and Miami by the end of February, and to pivot our Solana onboarding efforts into digital products like DRiP, our free NFT product with… https://t.co/kjNu9Ay4Gk

— Solana Spaces (@solanaspaces) February 21, 2023

Solana Spaces shuts down

Solana Spaces was founded just over a year ago, and its startup costs were funded by the Solana Foundation. Norby expressed his gratitude to the foundation for sponsoring Solana Spaces over the last year. The team hosted nearly 75,000 people in its stores and helped thousands walk away with Phantom wallets and Solana merch.

According to the founder, the mission of Solana Spaces was to experiment with new and disruptive models to bring people to Web3 and to serve the community on behalf of the Solana Foundation. Norby further said:

“The Solana Spaces team was the greatest startup retail team ever assembled, and we executed at the highest of levels.”

He added that in just eight months, the team designed a Web3 onboarding experience from scratch, in multiple cities, with its own merch, 30 collaborations, Spaces DAO, its own software, DRiP, and numerous experiments.

The company plans to continue engaging with the community in two ways. First, with Spaces DAO, the company plans to continue supporting the mission for Solana all over the world by open-sourcing both the software that powered Spaces and the brand. Second, the company is in the process of identifying a place for people to pick up Solana merchandise and take part in other IRL activities.

Data from CoinMarketCap shows that SOL has tanked over 7% since the news came out. SOL was trading at $23.39 at press time. Its market capitalization has gone down by 6.12% over the past 24 hours. Additionally, at the time of writing, SOL had a daily trading volume of $897 million.