Voice announces shutdown: four-year, $300 million effort

Voice, which transformed from social media to an NFT social platform, backed by EOS parent company Block.one and received an investment of up to US$300 million, failed to escape the fate of closure. On September 14, Voice announced that it would cease operations in a few months and would soon launch a service that allows NFTs to be migrated to self-hosted wallets.

"We believe it is in the best interest of Voice and its community to use remaining resources to optimize the platform closure process for users." Due to ongoing uncertainty in the cryptocurrency and NFT markets, Voice will gradually shut down operations in the coming months, with new user registration and trading markets currently disabled. In the next few weeks, Voice will launch a service that allows NFT assets on Voice to be migrated to EOS, Polygon and Ethereum. The assets of old users will be retained until December 31, 2024.

Voice is a decentralized social platform launched by EOS founder BM in June 2019. It benchmarks against social platforms such as Twitter (X) and Facebook. It is called "an application that will change the industry structure" and has invested up to $150 million.

In order to allow Voice to be launched smoothly and promoted better, on the one hand, Block.one paid a fine of US$24 million to the SEC to prepare for the compliance of the upcoming Voice; on the other hand, BM spent US$30 million to purchase The domain name Voice.com has become the largest publicly disclosed domain name sale record in history. It believes that it is "very expensive but very valuable."

In addition to the large capital investment, Block.one also purchased 3.3 million EOS RAM at one time, making it the richest "land dealer" in EOS network resources, once occupying only 30% of the EOS network memory. This also shows BM's expectation for Voice to become the largest DApp application on the EOS network.

Six months later, with Voice operating as an independent agency from its parent company, Block.one invested another $150 million, including $100 million in cash and $50 million worth of intellectual property assets. So far, Voice has received a total of US$300 million in investment.

However, Voice has been controversial due to poor product experience and serious privacy issues. BM's "social dream" was once again shattered. He also said in this regard, "Voice will not be regarded as a platform that can give freedom, and no company will Or service can make people free, and only being separated from technology can give people freedom.”

In May 2021, Block.one announced that Voice would be upgraded to an NFT-based social platform for emerging creators, and plans to launch it in the summer of 2021. Voice users of the platform will be able to freely create digital assets in various formats and simply buy and sell them. At the same time, any user who participates in the creation can receive royalties. Regarding the reason for the transformation, Block.one explained that it was affected by the company’s regulatory difficulties.

But such changes have not improved Voice's predicament. In the current downturn in the NFT market, even blue-chip NFTs are facing continued decline in price, transaction volume and number of users, and Voice's on-chain data is even less objective. DappRadar data shows that since the transformation, Voice has only seen a few transactions worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. Especially after May 2022, there has been no transaction volume at all. In addition, judging from the interaction of Voice's X official account, most of the retweets and likes of tweets in the past year are in single digits. From this point of view, the suspension of Voice is also expected.

From a high-profile debut to no one paying attention, another highly recommended project that BM spent more than four years and spent US$300 million on failed once again.