Since day one, our mission has been to empower creators with tools and opportunities to earn and openly collaborate. Our team has worked tirelessly to that end, along with all your support.
After building towards our vision for 3 years, we would like to share an update with the community today.
To date, we have powered 800 open calls that brought $1M worth of opportunities to the 48,000 artists who participated. Many artists have since exhibited in galleries around the world and kick-started their careers.
On the tooling and monetization side, we shipped pioneering technologies such as Composer and open curator fee — both unlocking new ways to earn for artists and curators.
Being consistent with our values of empowering creators, we have built a platform that is interoperable, gasless, non-custodial, with marketplace fees being “pay what you want”.
Despite our achievements together, we have faced significant challenges over the past few months.
Earlier this year, we ran out of funding for the project. As a result, we went through a restructure that included the departure of most team members. To make matters worse, our X account was hacked, so we lost our primary means of communication. (We still have not heard back from X support)
With the depleted resources, we have been trying our best to minimize impact to our community, while figuring out the path forward.
We have tried to keep the Joyn platform running for as long as we could, and worked on ways to reduce hosting costs. Unfortunately, keeping the platform running indefinitely is not a path we can afford.
After much deliberation, we have reluctantly decided to shut down the Joyn platform, effective Feb 1, 2025. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we are working on a smooth transition.
Instead of a live web app, we will be hosting a snapshot of existing data in static storage. We will be backing up off-chain data for open calls, profiles, showcases, and stories created before Jan 15, 2015. This hosted data will be accessible in static storage in the foreseeable future, well beyond Feb 1.
For all tokens that have been purchased on Joyn, they will remain in the owner’s wallet forever.
All other gasless tokens minted on Joyn that are not yet on chain (i.e. not sold or transferred) will remain off-chain. Feel free to remint them elsewhere. The same goes for listings as well, there is no need to cancel any listing.