(Bloomberg) -- The hack of thousands of digital wallets related to Solana was the talk of the crypto world Wednesday, except at the recently opened retail space dedicated to the blockchain network that is located in New York’s Hudson Yards.
While Solana Spaces sat largely empty shortly after it opened at 10 a.m., the site saw much more traffic during its inaugural opening last week, with “Solana Spaces Ambassadors” roaming the store eager to help educate the crypto curious. That’s the goal of the IRL, or in real life, experience that operators of the facility want to deliver. The store follows the introduction of Solana Mobile’s Saga, an Android phone.
Solana Spaces Chief Executive Officer Vibhu Norby said that they’ve had over 1,000 tutorials completed, with a lot of interest in the merchandise and rewards handed out in the form of USDC stablecoin tokens and NFTs.
“The store is very intentionally built, trying to guide you along some kind of path,” Norby said. “This first one is really just kind of a demo and a beta experience of what else we’re doing.”
Armed with a two-year lease, Norby said that he wasn’t interested in a long-term lease or a pop-up. The retailing veteran said that they are going to announce expansion plans during a Solana conference in November. “With a 100% certainty, there’s another space opening.” Norby said. “We’re gonna put these all over the world.”
The store, boasts an NFT gallery holding “Degen Apes,” merchandise and interestingly enough, a projection of a data visualization which tracked activity in the Solana NFT marketplace. Norby said that while the Solana Foundation provided a “large part” of the funding for Solana Spaces, they don’t own the company. He noted that the hack was unrelated to the giveaways at the store.
“My understanding is a lot of these wallets are older wallets,” Norby said. About 90% of the store visitors “are brand new to Solana, and the USDC and NFTs we gave them are the only things they have in their wallet.”
Solana has positioned itself as an alternative to the Ethereum blockchain, which has been criticized for high fees and slower transaction speeds. However, this has come at the cost of multiple network outages in the past year.
Mikkel Mørch, executive director at Digital Asset Investment Fund ARK36, said in an email on Wednesday that he sees the recent efforts with Solana’s mobile phone and the Solana Spaces store as emblematic of “Solana’s grand ambitions to become the pioneer of mainstream adoption of web3.”
“But when the company’s core products -- its blockchain and its DeFi ecosystem -- regularly suffer from downtime and security problems, you can’t help but think that Solana may have got it all backwards,” Mørch said.
Solana’s SOL token fell about 3% to $40.16 on Wednesday. the cryptocurrency has tumbled about 76% this year.
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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