Glass, a venture-backed crypto startup that sought to monetize NFT movies, is falling prey to the bear market; its founders are strolling away.
Co-founders Sam Sends and Varun Iyer posted on X (previously Twitter) Friday that they are going to “finish lively growth” of Glass Protocol after figuring out the demand for digital, tradeable video NFTs was too low to proceed.
“The marketplace for video NFTs can now not maintain Glass’ growth,” Iyer mentioned. Sends struck the same tone: “Sadly, we have now come to the conclusion that there’s not sustainable demand for video NFTs.”
The 2-and-a-half-year-old startup is the most recent sufferer to a sustained downturn in crypto buying and selling that has struck the NFT area notably arduous. Buying and selling volumes are down unhealthy for all types of on-chain collectibles, be they the well-known “blue chip” Bored Apes however particularly for smaller tasks like Glass, which by no means actually caught hearth.
The thought of Glass was to provide on-line content material creators a platform for minting and promoting their movies on to their followers, the place they could make more cash than, say, on YouTube. Its founders noticed the blockchain as bringing extra transparency to this course of, and likewise permanence, by storing them in a decentralized method.
“We actually wish to discover a method to assist everybody revenue,” Sends mentioned in a November 2021 podcast hosted by Arweave, the protocol’s decentralized file storage system of selection. “It’s a brand new technique to categorical and personal and share what you care about.”
Certainly, the NFTs created by means of Glass will live on alongside the web site and protocol, the founders mentioned. However they gained’t proceed engaged on the protocol, all however dooming its future progress.
Glass raised $5 million final September from buyers together with TCG Crypto and 1kx. It’s unclear if the protocol ran out of runway or has any of its enterprise capital remaining. Sends and Iyer didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In current months, the founders pivoted Glass from the Solana blockchain to Ethereum, the protocol’s unique residence.
