NFT Video Startup Glass Falls to Crypto Bear Market

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’ll “finish energetic improvement” of Glass Protocol after figuring out the demand for digital, tradeable video NFTs was too low to proceed.

“The marketplace for video NFTs can not maintain Glass’ improvement,” Iyer stated. Sends struck an analogous tone: “Sadly, we now have 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 house notably exhausting. Buying and selling volumes are down dangerous for all types of on-chain collectibles, be they the well-known “blue chip” Bored Apes however particularly for smaller initiatives like Glass, which by no means actually caught fireplace.

The concept 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 may earn more money 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 means to assist everybody revenue,” Sends stated in a November 2021 podcast hosted by Arweave, the protocol’s decentralized file storage system of alternative. “It’s a brand new approach 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 stated. However they received’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 latest months, the founders pivoted Glass from the Solana blockchain to Ethereum, the protocol’s authentic dwelling.