@itsbasil

skycastle is still here. our partners remain active. we have good teams in the incubator. we're not necessarily growing but that's not news to anyone here. what has changed is my priorities & me being honest about where my head is at. to rewind: this was ideated over a year ago. we started wanting to build YC onchain. not hackathons, not experiments, not token flips, but actual companies. we wanted to raise real money. buy clanker. own asset issuance. establish an ecosystem. potentially build a client. tokenize in useful ways: cross-marketing, user acquisition, incentives & alignment, not necessarily price appreciation, but sustainable growth. we wanted to bring consumer crypto into the mainstream. for real. with real products & net-new quality users. that was the vision. i've been in-and-out trying to do this since 2019. many have done the same... but for me, that was five years of no paycheck. real sacrifice. a lot of passion & yes, i'd do it all again... but i also have to be honest with myself. this space is unforgiving in a way that's hard to explain to people outside of it. when macro turns, we're the first thing that gets sold. when platform strategy shifts, we break. when timing is off, devs get blammed. we are all the way up the risk curve in a space that has scared away all of its consumers. i'm not here to blame anyone. a lot of this was our my own optimism. maybe a little too much of it & that's not entirely amiss today... but, a new opportunity has come my way that i truly believe in. something where i'm not two or three dependencies away from my own roadmap flipping upside down overnight. and at this point in my life, i have to go after it. so, no, skycastle is not shutting down nor closing, and the partners remain active & phenomenal stewards of this ecosystem on the daily. i, however, have terrible tunnel vision so that's where i've been these past few months... i should have communicated that better. y'all deserved more than silence & that's my fault. in terms of the $SKY token, it's still only ~15% float & a real yield opportunity remains on the horizon as some of clients tokenize but we won't force that. so there is still dry powder should the time come. that said, with respect to council members, we've returned contributions as requested. with respect to our partners, they are now vesting into an illiquid market (that includes garrett & i). so i hope no one got too rekt & i sincerely apologize if you did; we genuinely set out in good faith & are not closing the book just yet... and if one thing has remained true throughout it all, it's that we're still here & we're still ready to help where we can

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