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EOS founder BM's platform Voice announces shutdown: A four-year, $300 million attempt.

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Voice, a social media platform that transitioned to an NFT social platform and was backed by EOS parent company Block.one with up to $300 million in funding, ultimately could not escape the fate of being shut down. BM's 'social dream' was shattered once a

Original author: Nancy, PANews

Transforming from social media to NFT social platform, Voice, backed by EOS parent company Block.one and receiving up to $300 million in funding, ultimately failed to escape the fate of shutdown. On September 14th, Voice announced that it will cease operations in a few months and will soon launch a service that allows NFT migration to self-hosted wallets.

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

Voice is a decentralized social platform launched by EOS founder BM in June 2019, targeting social platforms such as Twitter (X) and Facebook. It is referred to as an "application that will change the industry landscape" and has invested up to $150 million for this purpose.

In order to ensure the successful launch and better promotion of Voice, on the one hand, Block.one paid a fine of $24 million to the SEC to prepare for the compliance of the upcoming Voice; on the other hand, BM spent $30 million to purchase the domain name Voice.com, which became the largest publicly disclosed domain name sales record in history. He believes that it is "expensive but valuable".

Aside from the significant capital investment, Block.one also purchased 3.3 million EOS RAM in one go, making it the wealthiest "landlord" of EOS network resources and 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.

Half a year later, as Voice became an independent entity from its parent company, Block.one invested $150 million, including $100 million in cash and $50 million in intellectual property assets. So far, Voice has received a total investment of $300 million.

However, Voice has been controversial due to poor product experience and serious privacy issues. BM's "social dream" has been shattered once again. He has also stated that "Voice will not be seen as a platform that can empower freedom. No company or service can give people freedom, only by breaking away from technology can people be free."

In May 2021, Block.one announced the upgrade of Voice to an NFT-based social platform aimed at emerging creators, with plans to launch in the summer of 2021. Voice users on this platform will be able to freely create various formats of digital assets and easily buy and sell them. Additionally, any user involved in the creation process will receive royalty income. Block.one explained that the reason for this transition was due to regulatory difficulties faced by the company.

However, such changes have not improved the plight of Voice. In the current downturn of the NFT market, even blue-chip NFTs are facing continuous declines in prices, trading volume, and user numbers, and Voice's on-chain data is even less objective. According to DappRadar data, since its transformation, Voice has only had a few transactions with hundreds or thousands of dollars, and especially after May 2022, there have been no transactions 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 have been in single digits. Therefore, the shutdown of Voice is also expected.

From a high-profile debut to being ignored, BM's recommended project, which cost over 300 million US dollars and took more than four years, has once again ended in failure.