So Long and Thanks For All The Carrots
It is with great sadness that we are announcing we have made the difficult decision to wind down the Hawku Marketplace on the morning of November 11, 2023.
When Hawku launched its marketplace in 2022, there was a huge need for a marketplace that handled gaming and utility NFTs with real time token data. Hundreds of thousands of people were playing, hundreds of games were about to launch (including from both indie and AAA developers) and the introduction of other Utility NFTs were on the short term horizon.
We delivered on that need, providing the premier marketplace for game NFTs that rely on real time data, and building a marketplace that people love and at our peak generating 3M+ page views a month with daily usage of 30 minutes a day.
Fast forward almost two years and the market has completely changed. What was once a big blue ocean is now a tiny red pond. The NFT markets are down 95%, most players and game studios have left the space entirely, and many mainstream consumers are afraid to enter crypto for fear of scams and phishing. Regulators are scrutinizing the space adding to uncertainty. Investors are hesitant to fund new or existing games given both the market conditions and regulatory uncertainty. While a few dozen brave games will try to ride out the storm, we anticipate the market will be orders of magnitude smaller than was expected. As a result, we have decided to wind down the marketplace.
We want to thank our games and players who have helped us along the way - working with us, providing us with feedback, giving insight and just cheering us on. We tried to be very community driven and could not have done this without you.
We will miss a lot about Hawku - the silly name, how we built a platform that made it easy to quickly configure games with real time data, letting people analyze their tokens like a Bloomberg terminal. We will miss chatting with our NFTs, using filters to find diamonds in the rough, that one time we accidentally charged someone 200% in marketplace fees, and continually adding functionality to make our games more fun. We will miss chatting with you as well as miss not being able to talk to our horses and have it give a snarky response. Mostly we will miss serving our community and helping people have fun in web3.
Hawku will continue to function as usual until November 10 (may extend into November 11). We wish everyone the best of luck in this crypto winter and are rooting for our games and the industry to eventually thrive once again!
Revoking Approvals
Once Hawku shuts down the home page will provide a form that will let you revoke all approvals for Hawku contracts (we will be pointing to revoke.cash).