HyperSpace shut down after years of stalled development with minor updates. The team repeatedly cited legislature and other legal obstacles preventing the project from moving forward while the community of investors and users demanded functional features including a real wallet. They first deleted their community Discord and then their website.
24 Hour Notice
It was a real shame to see it go like that, particularly since the termination took place with only 24 hours of notice presented in an email that read (and was later reposted on their site) as follows:
HyperSpace is shutting down.
It’s been five years since we began this journey. Five years pushing toward our vision, overcoming hurdle after hurdle, each unfamiliar, each unique and unexplored. Hurdles new to ourselves and to the market in which we were operating. In which we were pioneers.
Synereo was founded in 2014. On a shoestring budget and at great personal cost, we kept developing and iterating on the product, navigating the budding crypto-powered decentralization space. We believed that decentralization, combined with near-frictionless payments, would set the attention economy free.
Five years ago, offering an alternative to the predatory products offered by Facebook and other content giants was a much less obvious idea than it is today.
We did our best throughout the years to deliver on that promise, calibrating our offering but staying true to our long term vision of unlocking the value created by all participants in the attention economy. We wanted the denizens of the Internet to reclaim their social capital, building a mechanism that provides content creators, curators, distributors, forum admins and entire communities with ways of getting a fair share of the value they generate online.
We kept pace with increasing regulation and relied on technology not-yet-ready for primetime, navigating the new waters on tight budgets throughout the long period of our existence. However, in 2019, the operational and regulatory burdens have become a prohibitive factor. We launched HyperSpace while facing increasing resistance from banks, regulators, and strategic content partners pulling out at the last minute after a great many resources were put into the efforts.
We appreciate all of our followers who have supported us morally, financially, spiritually, and in so many other ways throughout the years. Your support allowed us to make a strong case for a truly disintermediated content economy. For a network fully operated and owned by its users. It allowed our collective voice to be heard, and our shared vision of freedom and fairness based on a new way to do Internet to permeate the world. Even without Synereo or HyperSpace, that voice lives on.
Our hearts go out to the tight community of creators that calls HyperSpace home. We sincerely hope you find a new, better one.
We have always appreciated your attention,
— The Synereo Team
Numerous investors lost large sums that are unlikely to be retrieved. There is currently discussion among these investors and the general former userbase on what can be done to restart the project and bring some fresh life into the AMP token.
HyperSpace ≠ Blockchain
HyperSpace was never blockchain-based. Instead, it is an ERC-20 token with a website built for content creation and storage on an IPFS layer. As a result, the content that was previously published on the HyperSpace website is now inaccessible. With a few hours to spare I managed to get mine backed up on Steem in a payment-declined post. I was lucky, didn’t have much content to back up. Others who had hundreds of original articles lost their work.
There are various options for HyperSpace if the team releases the database files. One, it can be imported and merged with a developed and functional content-friendly blockchain like Steem. Two, it can keep using IPFS. Three, it can be archived at a central repository. The website itself is simply a frontend which, if released open source, can be easily rebranded and hooked up to one of these three options. To date, the team has refused to release both the database and the site code.
Future Prospects
Not going to mince words here. I strongly suspect that we’ll see the site code and the general project architecture either sold or covertly recreated by the former HyperSpace team. There is no other logical reasoning behind their refusal to release these to the public now that the HyperSpace project has been shut down. With AMPs worth zero, like any good shitcoin that’s past its scam prime, there is virtually no reasoning why what’s left of this project can’t be passed into decentralized hands.
We’ll see what the future brings.
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