Glass, a venture-backed crypto startup that wanted to make money from NFT videos, falls prey to the bear market; the founders walk away.
Co-founders Sam Sends and Varun Iyer posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday that they will “terminate active development” of Glass Protocol after determining that demand for digital, tradable video NFTs was too low to continue.
“The video NFT market can no longer support the development of Glass,” Iyer said. Sends struck a similar tone: “Unfortunately, we have concluded that there is no sustainable demand for video NFTs.”
The two-and-a-half-year-old startup is the latest victim of an ongoing crypto trading downturn that has hit the NFT space particularly hard. Trading volumes are down badly for all forms of collectibles in the chain, be it the well-known “blue chip” Bored Apes, but especially for smaller projects like Glass, which never really caught fire.
The idea of Glass was to give online content creators a platform to produce and sell their videos directly to their fans, where they might be able to make more money than, say, on YouTube. The founders saw that the blockchain brought more transparency to this process, as well as sustainability, by storing them in a decentralized way.
“We really want to find a way to help everyone benefit from this,” Sends said in a November 2021 podcast hosted by Arweave, the protocol’s favorite decentralized file storage system. “It’s a new way to express, own and share what you care about.”
The NFTs created through Glass will continue to coexist with the website and protocol, the founders said. But they won’t continue to work on the protocol, virtually dooming its future growth.
Glass raised $5 million last September from investors including TCG Crypto and 1kx. It is unclear whether the protocol has run out of runway or whether there is any venture capital left. Sends and Iyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In recent months, the founders moved Glass from the Solana blockchain to Ethereum, the protocol’s original home.
