Solana’s Cardinal Protocol, known for introducing “conditional ownership” into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has decided chopped off its operations. The move comes in response to the bad economic conditions, the team behind the project shared via social media.
Cardinal of Solana Protocol has secured $4.4 million in funding to advance the utility of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). The seed funding was co-led by prominent crypto venture firm Protagonist and Solana Ventures.
The funding also saw participation from other entities in the industry, including Animoca Brands, Delphi Digital, CMS Holdings, and Alameda Research.
Dedicated to fueling the growth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Solana network, Cardinal Labs has played an important role as an infrastructure provider.
Their goal was to enable NFT use cases by offering various protocols and software development kits (SDKs). These valuable resources included various functions, including betting, rents, subscriptions, royalties, and trading.
The team said:
We’ve done our best to navigate this very challenging macroeconomic environment since we started building 18 months ago, but like many others, it’s been tough.
Financial conditions remain unchanged despite funding efforts
According to a spokesperson for Solana Cardinal, the investment made by Alameda Research was considered a relatively small part of the funding round. They explained that this investment did not play a role in the protocol’s financial difficulties.
Cardinal also secured an additional $750,000 in seed funding from Neo Ventures in 2021, boosting its financial support. Over the course of 18 months, Cardinal raised $5.2 million in funding.
This significant investment highlights the confidence placed in Cardinal’s vision and capabilities. By July 2022, the protocol also achieved a milestone with over 65,000 NFTs installed on their platform.
Additionally, Cardinal acknowledged that while there is “some real use” in their products, the adoption of blockchain technology by various industries around the world has been progressing at a slow pace,
Although we saw some real use of our storage, rentals, and identity products, we still felt like they were stuck in the context of the maximum crypto community.
While acknowledging the continued growth of blockchain adoption, the Cardinal team emphasized the challenges they faced in achieving product-market compatibility. In addition, they expressed the tendency of their team members to explore alternatives.
Solana Cardinal closing schedule
The team has issued an advice for users to manually withdraw their assets from the platform. This process will be completed within a two-month notice period, which began on June 28.
By July 19, the protocol will stop accepting new deposits, stop storage activities, and disable shareholder pool creation, token manager creation, name linking, and NFT leasing. During this period, users can only initiate withdrawals from the platform, ensuring a safe recovery of their assets.
If users do not withdraw their assets by the Aug. 26 deadline, Cardinal has implemented a policy where remaining assets will be forcibly withdrawn to the depositors’ address.
Featured image from CNBC, chart from TradingView.com