Foundation is offline

To our community,

We’re writing to provide a clear update on the state of Foundation.

Earlier this year, we entered into an agreement to sell the platform to a third party who intended to continue operating it. That process did not complete as expected. Ownership has now returned to us, and the platform is offline.

This period has been confusing and frustrating. Many of you were left without clear answers about the platform, your listings, and what would happen next.

Now that the platform is back under our control, we want to be direct about where things stand.

After careful consideration, we have made the decision not to resume operations.

This is both a financial and operational reality. The team that built and maintained Foundation is no longer in place, and we are not in a position to responsibly bring the platform back online or support it going forward. We also do not believe there is a buyer today with the combination of technical capability, financial resources, and aligned values required to operate Foundation for the long term.

Just as importantly, we are not willing to put this community through another period of uncertainty. Pursuing another transaction without confidence in the outcome risks repeating exactly what we have all just lived through.

As a result, the platform will remain offline indefinitely.

What this means for you

Your NFTs and their underlying media are not dependent on the Foundation platform.

Foundation was built as a non-custodial, onchain system. Your assets remain in your wallet and under your control. The smart contracts continue to exist onchain, independent of our frontend.

However, there are immediate, practical considerations:

Delisting NFTs from escrow: If your NFTs are currently listed via Foundation contracts, you will need to manually delist them.
Ensuring media availability: While content has been pinned, long-term resilience depends on broader redundancy.

Community-led tools and initiatives

Since it became clear the transaction would not complete, members of the community have already built and deployed tools to address these needs:

Tools to delist NFTs directly from Foundation contracts without using the Foundation UI
Community efforts to mirror and pin media and metadata for continued availability
Public resources that make it easier to locate and preserve CIDs and metadata

We’re proud of the resilience this community has shown and believe this is the right path forward.

These efforts are independent of Foundation, but they reflect the underlying system working as designed.

Our role from here

We will continue to:

Maintain our IPFS gateway through April 27, 2027 — one calendar year from the date of this letter — to give the community time to transition
Provide technical guidance to developers building directly against Foundation’s contracts and infrastructure

What endures

Foundation launched over six years ago as an early experiment in what onchain ownership could unlock. At the time, many of the primitives we relied on were still emerging. Creatively, technically, and culturally, what this community built on top of those foundations far exceeded our expectations.

While the platform is no longer active, the ideas behind it continue to evolve across a broader ecosystem. We remain optimistic that the core vision of empowering creators with true ownership has yet to fully play out.

This chapter is complete. The work, however, is not.

Thank you for the trust you placed in us, and for everything you created along the way.