Solana Spaces, which employed storefronts in Miami and New York City to promote the use of its blockchain, announced in Twitter on Tuesday that it will close all of its outlets by the end of the month.
According to CEO Vibhu Norby’s tweet, the firm has reached “an inflection point” and will switch its focus from brick-and-mortar experiences to NFTs. He said Solana Spaces would change its name to DRiP, a boutique NFT distribution platform developed by Norby and promoted at his retail locations.
Norby claimed that the administrative tasks involved in running the company’s brick-and-mortar locations proved to be too onerous and that there was little room for expansion.
Seven months have passed since Norby established the first Solana Spaces branch in Hudson Yards, New York. Visitors were led by its personnel through interactive stations that demonstrated how to use Solana. This includes tutorials on how to create a cryptocurrency wallet and exchanging tokens on a decentralised exchange. Later, Norby opened a second store in Miami.
According to a representative for the Solana Foundation, which awarded Norby a grant to assist Solana Spaces debut, approximately 60,000 visitors in total visited the stores over their six-month period, and they finished 16,000 onboarding lessons. The spokeswoman said that the Foundation has no financial stake in the business.
Solana Spaces touted its storefront as an interactive billboard for cryptocurrency companies like FTX, Phantom, and Orca that paid for exposure to mass audiences rather than as a place to sell products. They funded Solana Spaces’ operations with their advertising expenditures. Although the FTX collapse has shaken the industry to its core, Norby believed Solana Spaces could still survive thanks to his purported “retail-as-a-service” (RaaS) concept.
