Solana Spaces has announced that it will be closing its NYC and Miami stores by the end of February, with plans to focus on its free NFT product DRiP and other digital offerings.

The store’s founder, vibhu, shared in a tweet that the decision came as a previously shared plan to roll efforts into a “more efficient way to bring people into Solana.”

The following is a note from our founder, @vibhu.

Dear @solanaspaces community,

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 like DRiP, our free NFT product with… https://t.co/kjNu9Ay4Gk

— Solana Spaces (@solanaspaces) February 21, 2023

During their 8 months of operation, the storefronts did produce quite the buzz hosting over 75,000 guests, bringing thousands to the Solana chain, and helping new participants set up Phantom wallets on-site.

However, these sorts of stores might best be utilized as pop-ups or temporary experimental experiences rather than permanent locations. This is largely due to the overhead associated with maintaining a retail space, and one that is geared towards mostly online products at that.

Instead, Solana Spaces plans to continue on its mission of onboarding new participants to Solana through its NFT product, DRiP, which it says it will share more info on soon, along with a rebrand of its Twitter account.

While for most Solana fans this is sad news to hear, the chain itself does have some good news this week, with a date announced for Helium’s merge to the network.

The network, designed to solve connectivity issues with the internet through user-hosted and run hotspots announced that it will begin migration to the Solana chain on March 27 — encompass all wallets, hotspots, and Helium Network state, and will take place over a 24-hour transition period beginning at approximately 10:00 AM ET.

Helium shared in a blog post that “the move to Solana was enabled by the community passing HIP-70 last year and introducing several solutions to scaling the Helium network,” and that it is thrilled to share the milestone and “usher in a new phase of the Network.”

Solana was chosen because of its ability to power thousands of transactions per second, its massive ecosystem of developers, applications, and integrations — which will allow for the Helium core developers and community to focus on building wireless protocols and enabling utility on these networks.

Once the merge is completed, HNT (Helium’s native token) will become natively compatible with other platforms within Solana’s ecosystem, adding utility for HNT, MOBILE, and IOT token holders.

In other news, can OpenSea’s “temporary” royalty shift have a permanent effect?