Solana’s Cardinal NFT Protocol to Shut Down: The End of an Era in Non-Fungible Tokens

Solana’s Cardinal protocol known for supporting NFT use cases and launching Conditional Ownership in the space has announced that it is shutting down, citing poor economic conditions for this decision.

We’ve done our best to navigate this incredibly difficult macroeconomic environment since we began building 18 months ago, but like for many others, it has been challenging.

Users have been asked to withdraw their funds from the platform manually, a process that is expected to be completed in a two-month notice period starting from June 28.

Hey Everyone, we have some unfortunate news to share 🙁

After a lot of reflection, we’ve decided to begin the process of winding down our protocols. Let’s dive into it 🧵 ⬇️

— Cardinal (@cardinal_labs) June 28, 2023

By July 19, the protocol would stop its staking activities, halt accepting new deposits, and also ensure that token manager creation, name linking, NFT rentals, and stake pool creation are disabled. This means the only active feature on the platform would be the withdrawal.

In situations where some users refuse to withdraw their assets by August 26, a policy has been implemented to forcibly withdraw them to the depositor’s address. After this, their UIs and smart contract deployment will be removed from Solana. In so doing, all SOL-denominated rent stored in all accounts would be removed from the relevant accounts’ initial fee or rent payer

Cardinal Protocol Raised $4 Million Funding

Nearly a year ago, Cardinal Protocol raised $4.4 million in funding as part of an effort to enhance the Utility of NFT. The funding round was led by Protagonist and Solana Ventures with the likes of Animoca Brands, Delphi Digital, CMS Holdings, and Alameda Research participating.

According to their spokesperson, Alameda Research’s investment was just a small portion of the funding round, hence, did not play any role in its economic difficulties. It can be recalled that Cardinal received $750,000 in pre-seed funding from Neo Ventures in 2021. About $5.2 million in funding was raised in just 18 months, indicating the level of confidence placed in its potential. In July 2022, the protocol recorded more than 65,000 NFTs staked on its platform

Cardinal admitted that the adoption of blockchain technology by ious industries was very slow, despite having some real usage in their product

While we’ve seen some real usage of our staking, rentals, and identity products, we continue to feel like they’re stuck in the context of the crypto maximalist community.

With this, Cardinal stated that they believe a day will come when intrinsic value and utility would be the focus for digital assets. For now, their focus is to carry out the process in a way the Solana eco is not affected.

During the process, the team declared their willingness to assist users by answering any question in their discord

As of press time, Solana (SOL) had a bullish sentiment with a 12 percent surge in the last seven days to trade at $18