The parent company of Siacoin sSC, Skynet Labs, has announced it will shut down operations after failing to raise sufficient funds in its latest funding round.
The decision will not affect the Skynet platform, which will continue to operate, and all users files will remain on the platform.
Skynet is a decentralized app hosting and storage platform designed to build a decentralized internet.
The company, formerly known as Nebulous, raised $3 million in a funding round in 2020. While it is a pioneer in decentralization, other projects such as Filecoin, Storj and Arweave have emerged with more financial muscle.
After the announcement, Skynet Labs will still operate for 12 weeks, during which the company will focus on ensuring a smooth transition to the Skynet Community.
David Vorick, the company's CEO, said the firm has already laid off half of its employees and will lay off half of those remaining over the next month.
It will make sure that all the necessary work is done before the company shuts down. He hopes to make the transition to a post-Skynet Labs ecosystem as invisible as possible. He said that users of the firm would not notice the change if everything went as planned.
The company focusing on several things at once has made it hard to develop one product, according to the CEO.
He said that Skynet, despite being a solid technology, never got the adoption from the space compared to competitors like Arweave AR and IPFS.
He said that the team grew too fast based on the bet that the user base would translate into more funds.
Several team members of Skynet Labs will continue to work on and support the project. The Skynet ecosystem and the Sia Foundation will remain fully operational.