ShapeShift, a leading startup in the crypto and blockchain industry, has continued its drastic product overhaul, recently revealing that it was dropping a lesser-known feature from its extensive lineup of products, services, and applications.
Prism Is Shutting Down
On Tuesday, ShapeShift, a Switzerland-based crypto infrastructure firm, revealed that it would be discontinuing Prism come the second week of November via an official blog post.
For those who aren’t in the loop, Prism is a series of smart contracts that allow users to experience the thrill of having a diversified portfolio of crypto assets without the risk of mismanagement or the difficulty of setting up multiple accounts and wallets. More specifically, as pulled straight from the horse’s mouth:
“Prism is, at its core, a set of smart contracts which enable collateralized portfolios of digital assets to be established, giving price exposure to users without counter-party risk and without the need to take delivery, or set up or manage multiple wallets.”
Prism, which is evidently one of the members of ShapeShift’s vast product family, has and still is in a closed beta, which began over 18 months ago before 2017’s monumental bull run. But while its description may sound like a promising project, the firm behind it explained that over the course of the beta, the team realized that the same functionality could be installed via a “different (and likely superior) product” that would be based off Prism’s underlying technology.
Keeping this in mind, ShapeShift has formally decided to “reimagine” the product itself. For now, the details regarding Prism’s successor has been kept under lock and key, with the Swiss startup adding it is still “deep in work” on other services, including the ShapeShift.io exchange, price tracker CoinCap, the KeepKey storage solution, along with other unnamed activities that ShapeShift’s 120 person team is working hard on. As the firm later added, “we should sunset the current Prism product, both in order to focus on our core platform, and to clear the pallet for a potential reimagining of what this technology can do later on.”
As such, over the coming weeks, the Prism.exchange domain will be gradually shut down until the site goes silent on October 11th, 2018, which will also be when ShapeShift will shut down all of the diversified portfolios, or “Prisms” as they are known to some.
Shapeshift Membership Program Met With Community Outcry
As aforementioned, the startup, headed by industry veteran Erik Voorhees, is in the midst of a product/service”reimagining.” This move to shutdown Prism follows the Switzerland-based firm’s plan to instate a mandatory controversial membership program, fittingly named the ShapeShift Membership program.
This move came as a surprise to many, as those without an account would be denied access to the primary ShapeShift.io exchange offering. Since the original announcement, as reported by NewsBTC, the firm has fallen victim to heavy criticism by diehard decentralists, as they claim that the platform is implementing this to adhere to governmental and regulation concerns. These same individuals, which likely number in the thousands, have now resorted to boycotting the membership system.
The firm has now employed the use of an airdrop of FOX tokens, which operate hand-in-hand with the membership program, in a bid to entice individuals to sign up for the controversial program.
?⏳ Don’t miss out! The first 100,000 users to complete account sign up will receive 100 FOX tokens. Sign up for ShapeShift Membership now: https://t.co/pIXj40o0nU pic.twitter.com/11AOUeAXzW
— ShapeShift ? (@ShapeShift_io) September 11, 2018
Controversy aside, Shapeshift CEO Voorhees still holds a positive outlook on the fate of this industry, divulging that while the bear market may not be over yet, that accumulating now could prove to return massively in the next few years or decades.
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