At the end of this month, the physical retail, educational, and communal space known as Solana Spaces, which was dedicated to Web3, would have closed all of its outlets.
The company is getting ready to close its locations in New York City and Miami after using both cities as stores to encourage using its Solana blockchain technology.
The company's officials stated (1) that the young company had reached a turning point and now plans to transition from the traditional brick-and-mortar settings to the more dynamic and exciting realm of non-fungible tokens (NFT).
Solana Spaces to be Rebranded
According to CEO Vibhu Norby, Solana Spaces will soon be rebranded as DRiP, a boutique NFT rollout platform built by Norby and marketed in retailers.
Norby, who established the Solana Spaces in early 2022, stated that while the retailers onboard between 500 and 1000 new customers each week, DRiP will bring onboard the same amount of new customers every day!
A few weeks ago, the final decision was to terminate business operations at the retail establishments in the Wynwood region of Miami and the Hudson Yards neighborhood of Manhattan.
The initiative taken by Solana Spaces was both innovative and ground-breaking; nonetheless, it lasted only a short time. After only seven months since Norby opened Solana Spaces in a posh mall in New York City's Hudson Yards, the company has decided to make the news to close the business.
Its workers led guests through interactive workshops that taught them how to utilize Solana, such as creating a crypto wallet and exchanging tokens on a decentralized exchange. Solana hosted these sessions. After some time, Norby established a second location in Miami.
According to a spokesman from the Solana Foundation, over 60,000 customers visited the stores over six months and completed sixteen thousand onboarding courses. The Solana Foundation provided this information, and the representative also confirmed that the Foundation has no financial stake in the company.
Because the company wasn't offering a product but rather teaching users about cryptocurrency by becoming an engaging billboard for cryptocurrency firms like FTX, Phantom, and Orca that paid for visibility to traditional audiences, the concept was quite novel and intriguing. Solana Spaces's ability to conduct business was made possible by the funds put into advertising.
Norby insisted that the company could survive the collapse of FTX by utilizing its retail-as-a-service (RaaS) business model, even though the failure of FTX was catastrophic for the company.
One year before this, Norby's first attempt at RaaS, the technology and gadget-oriented store known as b8ta, ceased operations because the business owners could not agree with the landlords.
As a concluding remark, Norby stated that the choice was less based on the funds and more concerning the vision for the project, which needed to be aligned, and that this was the primary reason for the decision.
Meanwhile, the company is continuing to create DRiP. This NFT distribution platform has attracted the attention of several crypto fans, and thousands of people signed up for it through stores hosted by Solana Spaces.
