Solana Spaces comes back to life in NYC

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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.

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