• Solana Spaces announced that it will be closing its web3 embassies in New York City and Miami by the end of February 2022
• Their NFT productDRiP is currently onboarding between 500 and 1000 people per day
• Solana spaces combined were onboarding roughly the same number of people per week as DRiP

Solana Spaces, a startup that aimed to bring people to the Web3 world, has announced that it will be closing its web3 embassies in New York City and Miami by the end of February 2022. Instead, the company will pivot its efforts towards digital products like DRiP, a free NFT product that has seen 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…

— DRiP💧 (@drip_haus) February 21, 2023

Solana Spaces was founded just over a year ago, and its startup costs were funded by the Solana Foundation. The company has expressed its deep gratitude to Phantom, Orca, and other ecosystem teams for sponsoring Solana Spaces over the last year.

The Solana Spaces team was a retail powerhouse, designing a Web3 onboarding experience from scratch in multiple cities, with their own merchandise, 30 collaborations, and their own software. In just eight months, they hosted almost 75,000 people in their web3 embassies and helped thousands walk away with Phantom wallets and Solana merch.

Wrong place at the wrong time

At the time the Solana Spaces New York store was announced, there was a common feeling that this idea could do very well when applied to Africa. The reasons behind this haven’t changed. Infrastructure challenges such as internet access and hostile attitudes towards cryptocurrencies by governments still exist. Binance conducted a tour of Francophone Africa which went very well. This proves that the concept still has lessons for Africa. However, the numbers clearly show that the web3 embassy concept did not do as well as it could have in the US. Now Solana will turn its focus to another product of Solana spaces, DRiP which has outpaced the physical web3 embassies in onboarding.

The company’s mission from day one was to experiment with new and disruptive models to bring people to Web3. To serve the community on behalf of the Solana Foundation. The team quickly realized that they needed to find a more efficient way to bring people into Solana. They found that in DRiP. The decision to close the web3 embassies was not an easy one, but the team recognized that they were at an inflexion point with their stores and their digital products. They decided to focus their ongoing efforts on DRiP. More information on the plan for DRiP will be announced soon.

Solana DRiP

Solana Drip is a decentralized finance (DeFi) project built on the Solana blockchain. It is a yield-farming platform that allows users to earn rewards by staking their Solana-based tokens in liquidity pools.

Users can stake their tokens and provide liquidity to the Drip pools, which are used to facilitate trades on decentralized exchanges. In return, users receive DRIP tokens as rewards, which can be used to earn additional rewards or traded on cryptocurrency exchanges.

DRIP is a deflationary token by design, meaning that its supply decreases over time through a mechanism called “burning.” This creates scarcity and potentially increases the value of the token over time.

Solana following the numbers

The decision to close the New York and Miami Solana Spaces came down to numbers. DRiP is performing very well for Solana. The project is currently onboarding between 500 and 1000 people per day. Solana spaces combined were onboarding roughly the same number of people per week. Yet the physical web3 embassies have much larger fixed costs attached to them.

You also have to think about it from a scalability point of view. The web3 embassies had a very low upper limit to the number of people they can handle at a time. While digital platforms like DRiP also have upper limits it is not a small number under any circumstances. In a market like the US, a digital-only approach might well be better. With high internet penetration and a regulatory infrastructure that is catching up to the territory and fast.

Not the end for Solana Spaces

Despite closing its US-based stores, Solana Spaces is not completely saying goodbye to its mission. The company plans to continue supporting the mission of Solana IRL all over the world. They will be open-sourcing both the software that powers Spaces and the brand. They hope to see others picking up where they left off. Additionally, the company is in the process of identifying a place for people to pick up Solana merch and participate in other IRL activities in NYC and Miami.

The final week of Solana Spaces is upon us, and the retail team has been instructed to be ultra-generous. Customers can come by and grab some free high-quality Solana gear while supplies last, with some limitations. The company has asked customers to share a picture and what they got on Twitter so that everyone can enjoy the final week of Solana Spaces together

Over the last two months, the team has increasingly focused on DRiP. DRiP onboards between 500 and 1,000 people per day. The web3 embassies onboarded the same number of people per week at best.