Glass
It bet YouTubers would sell their videos as NFTs
A Los Angeles startup whose platform let online video creators mint their videos as NFTs and sell them directly to fans, with the files stored on Arweave.
- Capital raised (announced)
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2022 |
|
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sam Sends | — | Now works on collective intelligence at Soma | Oct 2026 | |
| Varun Iyer | — | Independent AI safety researcher | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
2023
CoinDesk reported that in the months before the shutdown the founders moved Glass from Solana back to Ethereum, its original home.
8 September 2023
Today we have some unfortunate news to share. After a lot of consideration, we've decided to wind down development of Glass 🧵
How it ended
On 8 September 2023 the company and its two co-founders announced they were ending active development of Glass. Iyer said the market for video NFTs could no longer sustain it; Sends said they had concluded there was no sustainable demand for video NFTs. The founders said the website, protocol and existing NFTs would stay online and free to use, and CryptoPotato reported the Telegram channel would close. CoinDesk reported it was unclear whether any of the venture money remained.
Still alive
Open spot
Glass is gone. Is your NFT marketplace still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
12 sources behind this page.
- 1NFT video startup Glass announces the termination of its development activities, having previously raised $5 million in investments from 1kx and others · ChainCatcher · Sep 2023
- 2NFT Video Startup Glass Falls to Crypto Bear Market · CoinDesk · Sep 2023
- 3NFT startup Glass suspends development year after $5m funding · crypto.news · Sep 2023
- 4Glass Protocol's Founders to Walk Away Due to Lacking Demand for Video NFTs · CryptoPotato · Sep 2023
- 5GlassProtocol/editions commit history · GitHub · Jul 2022
- 6samsends GitHub profile · GitHub · user-editable
- 7Sam Sends personal site · samsends.com
- 8X posts by @glassprotocol, 7 to 10 September 2023 · twitterapi.io (X data provider)
- 9Varun Iyer personal site · vaiyr.com
- 10NFT startup Glass shuts down a year after raising $5 million · Web3 Is Going Just Great · Sep 2023
Show 2 moreShow fewer
- 11@sam_sends profile · X, retrieved via twitterapi.io
- 12@vaiyr_ profile · X, retrieved via twitterapi.io
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.