Original author: Nancy, PANews
Transitioning from social media to NFT social platform, backed by Block.one, the parent company of EOS, and with a funding of up to $300 million, Voice ultimately failed to escape the fate of shutdown. On September 14th, Voice announced that it would cease operations in a few months and will soon launch a service that allows NFT migration to self-custody wallets.
"We believe that using the remaining resources to optimize the platform's termination process is in the best interests of Voice and its community." Due to the ongoing uncertainty in the cryptocurrency and NFT markets, Voice will gradually shut down its operations in the coming months, and new user registration and the trading market have been disabled. In the next few weeks, Voice will launch a service that allows NFT assets on Voice to migrate to EOS, Polygon, and Ethereum, while existing user assets will be retained until December 31, 2024.
Voice is a decentralized social platform launched by BM, the founder of EOS, in June 2019. It aims to compete with social platforms like Twitter and Facebook and is referred to as an "application that will change the industry landscape," with an investment of up to $150 million.
In order to ensure the successful launch and promotion of Voice, on one hand, Block.one paid a fine of $24 million to SEC, preparing for the upcoming compliance of Voice; on the other hand, BM invested $30 million to purchase the domain name Voice.com, making it the largest publicly disclosed domain name sale record in history, believing it is "expensive but valuable".
In addition to substantial financial investment, at that time, Block.one also purchased 3.3 million EOS RAM, making it the richest "landlord" of EOS network resources, occupying 30% of the EOS network memory. This also indirectly indicates BM's expectation for Voice to become the largest DApp application on the EOS network.
Six months later, as an independent institution separated from its parent company, Voice received another $150 million investment from Block.one, including $100 million in cash and $50 million worth of intellectual property assets. So far, Voice has received a total of $300 million in investment.
However, Voice has been controversial due to poor user experience, serious privacy issues, and BM's "social dream" shattered once again. BM has also stated that "Voice will not be seen as a platform that can empower freedom. No company or service can grant people freedom, only escaping from technology can give people freedom."
In May 2021, Block.one announced the upgrade of Voice to a social platform for emerging creators based on NFTs and plans to launch it in the summer of 2021. On this platform, Voice users will be able to freely create various formats of digital assets and easily trade them. At the same time, any user participating in creation will receive royalty income. Block.one explained that the reason for the transformation was the impact of regulatory constraints on the company.
However, this change did not improve Voice's predicament. In the current downturn of the NFT market, even blue-chip NFTs are facing continuous declines in prices, trading volume, and user numbers. The on-chain data of Voice is even less objective. According to DappRadar data, since the transformation, Voice has only had a few hundred to a few thousand dollars in transaction volume, especially after May 2022, there have been no transactions at all. In addition, looking at the interaction of Voice's official account 'X' on social media, such as retweets and likes, most of them are in single digits in the past year. Therefore, the shutdown of Voice is not unexpected.
From high-profile debut to no one caring, BM's recommended project, which cost more than $300 million and took over four years, has once again ended in failure.
