After less than a year, Solana-themed stores in New York and Miami are closing their doors.
Solana Spaces, a physical retail, educational, and community space dedicated to Web3 and Solana blockchain, is set to close its doors at the end of February.
The news was revealed on February 21st by Solana Spaces on Twitter, citing Solana-themed stores founder and CEO Vibhu Norby.
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In an open letter to Solana Spaces customers, Vibhu Norby noted that Solana-themed stores did not help onboard as many people as the firm initially expected.
Vibhu Norby and his team opened Solana Spaces less than a year ago. The first store was opened in July 2022 in New York City. After a month, Norby opened another store in Miami.
At that time, Norby claimed that per month, Solana Spaces will help attract over 100,000 people to the Solana ecosystem. However, the latest tweet revealed that over the past seven months, Solana Spaces stores were visited by almost 75,000 people.
On top of that, Solana Spaces CEO noted that the onboarding process was too slow. In a letter, Vibhu Norby remarked that, on average, physical stores onboarded between 500 and 1,000 people per week.
When talking about the decision to close Solana Spaces, Vibhu Norby noted:
Over the last 2 months, it became increasingly clear to me that we were at an inflection point with our stores and our digital products, and a few weeks ago we made the call to focus our ongoing efforts on DRiP.
DRiP is Solana Spaces' newest project, which will function as a non-fungible token (NFT) airdrop platform. In his message, Solana Spaces CEO highlighted that the company is set to share more information about its newest project in the coming days.
In Solana Spaces stores, customers could earn rewards, purchase Solana-themed merchandise, participate in crypto wallet onboarding tutorials, and attend crypto-related events.
At the end of its letter, Vibhu Norby encouraged Solana fans to visit stores for one last time and “grab some free high-quality Solana gear.”
