Solana Spaces to close physical shops in NYC and Miami

Solana-themed stores will close by the end of February, seven months after being opened by a startup called Solana Spaces. The company will be rebranded as the NFT distribution platform DRiP, which was also promoted in the stores along with Solana’s and Phantom’s products.

The company made an announcement of the closure on Twitter:

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 more than 100k sign-ups.

Seven months ago, Solana Spaces opened its first physical store in New York City to attract newcomers to Web3. Shortly after, the second store opened in Miami. While something like a Web3 IRL (‘in real life’) experience is nothing unusual – you may remember the BAYC restaurant in Los Angeles, Bored and Hungry, Solana Spaces founder, Vibhu Norby, said they couldn’t find a more efficient way to promote Solana and have reached an inflection point with their brick-and-mortar Web3 gateways.

The Solana Foundation helped the startup open its stores, which had over 60,000 visitors and completed over 16,000 tutorials in that period. The Solana Foundation has no financial stake in the startup. When FTX collapsed, the startup believed it could sustain itself using RaaS (retail-as-a-service) model.

Even though these particular Miami and New York stores are closing, it’s not the end for Solana Stores. Norby told Decrypt that one of the franchises will open in India in the coming weeks. In addition, Solana Spaces in Miami will continue to have a smaller presence in other apparel stores in the area.

The startup will now focus on DRiP, an online platform that had the same amount of traffic regardless of being promoted online or offline in stores. With DRiP, collectors receive free Solana NFTs on a weekly basis, and interest in the platform is growing:

As a founder who has a background working in software products and things like MySpace and other social things back in the day—I really thought it [would make] little sense not to pursue that aggressively. So a team from spaces and myself are taking that and running with it.