Solana Spaces comes back to life in NYC
A memecoin community delivered on a brick-and-mortar pop-up store
Amol Gharte and Johnny Wilson of Solana Spaces | Jack Kubinec for Blockworks
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Starting in June of 2022, Solana Spaces operated a brick and mortar store for Solana-branded merchandise and user onboarding in New York’s Hudson Yards development. The venture’s biggest financial backer then was FTX, and it (along with a second store in Miami) folded in early 2023 following the exchange’s implosion.
This week at Solana’s Accelerate conference, Solana Spaces returned as a pop-up store with a new core team. The project doesn’t have FTX backing, but the reboot began with a very “2025” source of funding — a memecoin.
Solana Spaces season 2 has more limited ambitions than the original, running pop-up stores for crypto merchandise alongside crypto conferences. For the faithful who descended on the New York pop-up, there was a general sense of pleasant surprise that a memecoin team pulled off a brick-and-mortar store activation.
The lower east side pop-up was bustling with crypto natives on Tuesday morning. Merch was on sale from a variety of Solana-based projects and NFT collections. I purchased a mug and checked out by paying with stablecoins from the Phantom app on my iPhone.
When another customer came up to check out, Amol Gharte — a Solana Spaces core team member who was working the register — didn’t have the item’s price handy and joked that he could make one up.
“It’s all made up anyway,” the customer responded, and Gharte and I shrugged and nodded our heads at the vague declaration. A second customer stepped up to pay but somewhat sheepishly pulled out a credit card, explaining that he wanted to get credit card points from the purchase.
A fan of the old Hudson Yards store launched a memecoin called STORE in January which briefly eclipsed $12 million in market capitalization, according to DEX Screener data. Some early buyers of the token — which is now closer to $3 million in market cap — came together to try and revive Solana Spaces, Gharte told me. He added that the Solana Spaces team hasn’t sold its tokens and has self-imposed a vesting period.
The project is partly self-funded but also has inked sponsorship deals and received grant funding from the Solana Foundation, Gharte said.
The vision for Solana Spaces is to continue running pop-ups during crypto conferences, where Spaces gives crypto teams a place to sell their merchandise, and Solana Spaces collects 20% of the profit, Gharte said. He estimated 70% of sales volume is paid with credit cards compared to 30% in stablecoins.
I found Vibhu Norby, who was founder and CEO of the original Solana Spaces before building a Jupiter-acquired NFT app named DRiP, steaming a cloth banner in the back of the store. He told me he was “skeptical” when he saw a memecoin community crop up around reviving his deprecated business, but he gave the team some initial capital, support and introductions, and he hoped they could figure it out.
Norby told me he was initially drawn to starting Solana Spaces by a belief that blockchain communities can form network states, a Balaji Srinivasan-coined term for digital communities forming their own real-world communities. Norby added that in crypto, traditional identity markers tend to be replaced by things like profile pictures or merchandise.
“To me, there is a higher meaning to it. It’s not just a merch shop. Here you come and you find your home, and you walk away with a piece of that,” Norby said.
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