Nearly a year after raising $4.4 million, Solana’s NFT utility provider, Cardinal Labs, has decided to close up shop. The protocol was launched in early 2022 as an infrastructure provider to improve NFT utility for SOL users but, as of Wednesday, the Cardinal team announced on Twitter that the realities of the current macroeconomic climate had led them to an inevitable wind-down of operations.
The team noted on the popular social media platform that, on reflection, product-market fit for the protocol had proved rather challenging, and usage of the associated staking, rental and identity products had failed to get off the ground, essentially being ‘stuck’ within the crypto maximalist community context until the possibility of wider blockchain adoption grew.
The Cardinal team did impress upon users that the underlying codebase would live-on for all to access, regardless of post live-deployments, and further reassured that any user assets would remain safe to be returned to rightful owners by the end of the process.
By August 26 the official two-month shutdown period should have concluded, a timeframe which was detailed further and revealed that activities such as creating staking pools, managing tokens and rental extensions, interacting personally across social media accounts and even acceptance of deposits would no longer be available come July 19.
Suggestions across Twitter have focussed on the potential contextual factors behind the failing success of such a Solana-related utility, with a crypto expert by the handle of ‘Jagoecapital’ rightly stating that “Solana protocols aren’t currently backed up in the markets right now”.
