We are shutting down Sphere. Here is why.

The last 3 years of Sphere have been exciting. We set out on an ambitious goal to change how startups and businesses raise liquidity. We built a robust platform and helped over 13 businesses raise approximately $5M USD liquidity. This was not a mean feat as a new entrant in a highly competitive industry. While this was impactful to the industry, the business has constantly not broke even and therefore not a going concern. In fact, we have made losses month on month, year on year. At no point has Sphere turned a profit.

The big question might be how we managed to have a long runway with no profitability.

As it is generally known, we raised VC capital in 2021 where a big chunk went towards payroll. By mid quarter 2 of 2023 we had run out of funds and contemplated shutting down the business at that point. That would have meant that even though we had built out a working platform and business as promised we would have failed our commitment to early investors to allocate tokens. Faced with this quagmire, we launched the SXS token in the middle of a bear market. This enabled us pay our debt to early investors and meet the expectations of the public.

Over 90% of funds raised in the public sale went towards exchange listing, liquidity on Uniswap and Bitget. At this point we were again faced with the original funding problem. We had a team of 18 that expected monthly pay and also other business costs that we were obligated to meet. Our strong belief in the team and commitment to building a great product saw us footing business costs using personal money believing the market would allocate capital towards utility products like Sphere and great teams in the early days of the bull market. This has not been the case.

Towards the end of the last quarter of 2023, we resorted to paying salaries with SXS in treasury. Most of the tokens in treasury were tokens that had been bought with our own funds. In other words, we continued paying for business expenses with personal funds. We do not regret this. Any serious entrepreneur with the goodwill would have done the same.

In the light of the above, we are winding up Sphere. There are always two outcomes to a business when starting out. Success or failure. According to data, the obvious outcome is failure as success is rare. We find ourselves in the common category - failure.

We had a good run but the tide wasn’t in our favor.

What does this mean for staked SXS and vested IDO tokens?

The platform will stay up until the end of the claiming period for staked SXS and vested IDO tokens. Make sure to claim your tokens when the vesting and unlock period arrive. The website will then be offline afterwards.

We no longer have employees on payroll for moderation and therefore going to employ use of AI in handling queries.

As we embark on a different journey we might have some news in a few weeks.

We have built before and we are going to build again.

We don’t give up.

See you around.

And here is the recap of the AMA with @Thecrypto_lion

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Solwana Launch! AMA with Crypto Lion

Brace yourself for the next Biggest Meme on Solana!

Missed yesterday's AMA with @MetaWhale90 about Everything Solwana?

Catch up here and get ready for Solwana's launch, today at 6 PM UTC!

? When a serious, doxed team launches a meme coin...
? Today at 6PM UTC!

? Fair Launch Alert!
? Lock LP
? No Team Tokens
? From the doxed @SphereSXS team

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? See you all at 6PM UTC! Let's make it epic! ??

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