(Bloomberg) -- Solana Spaces — a venture that made a splash last summer when it launched brick-and-mortar stores in New York and Miami to back projects and technology around the namesake blockchain — is abandoning the initiative after less than a year as the crypto industry remains under a cloud.

“We’ve made the difficult decision to sunset our stores in NYC and Miami by the end of February, and to pivot our Solana onboarding efforts into digital products,” including its free nonfungible token, the startup’s Chief Executive Vibhu Norby said in a statement posted on Twitter on Wednesday. 

Launched with funding from the Solana Foundation, the startup’s stores boasted NFT galleries, merchandise and data visualizations tracking activity in the Solana NFT marketplace. Norby told Bloomberg News after the opening that the company had ambitions to expand “all over the world.” 

Read more: Solana Brings Crypto to Real World While Virtual Setbacks Abound

Solana, which  positioned itself as an alternative to the Ethereum blockchain, has been struggling to convince industry watchers about its prospects following the collapse of crypto platform FTX in November. FTX’s founder and one-time crypto kingmaker Sam Bankman-Fried had been a big supporter of the protocol. Solana’s token SOL, has fallen around 27% since November.

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