Transitioning of SoonLabs and Soonaverse to Open Source Announcement

By the end of July 2024, all SoonLabs entities will be officially closed. Due to resource constraints, the entity can no longer afford to continue supporting the Soonaverse product and paying the monthly infrastructure costs.

However, the technology is much more than just the Soonaverse itself and will continue on. To learn more about the complete open sourcing effort please read our most recent announcement: https://soonlabs.medium.com/a-journey-completed-announcing-our-open-source-release-986591841863

The Soonaverse is a product built on top of an open source project, all costs are directly associated with the APIs being used. As with every software product, you need to pay to host and run it and all of the services within it. Since the Soonaverse is a feeless platform and does not generate revenue, all of these have been pure costs that have been absorbed 100% by the SoonLabs team. As this organization will no longer be operational, we are working on onboarding a new group that will be stepping in to take on the responsibility and task of establishing a sustainable business and operational model to support the continuation of the project.

Costs and requirements for the ongoing operation of the Soonaverse:

1. A new legal entity must be established and the costs of running within the chosen jurisdiction will fall to the new operators.

2. Costs (Monthly):

• Google Cloud: $2,500
• IOTA Nodes (Hetzner): $800
• Cloudflare: $275
• Algolia: $650

The responsibility for supporting the Soonaverse infrastructure costs will transfer to a team within the community that wishes to support the application. This needs to be a trusted operator that is a known and trusted entity within the community and is willing to operate it to and beyond the standards our users are accustomed to. We are in talks with different teams, that fit this definition, however, if no team is identified and validated within the next 30 days the Soonaverse application will cease to operate.

All NFTs and digital assets minted to the L1 Shimmer and IOTA networks are safe and will not be impacted. If you have unminted digital assets on the Soonaverse, we suggest you mint them to either L1 as they will not be supported if the Soonaverse is not adopted by a new team.

All Buildcore operations and our work as a member of the /justbuild community will continue as normal. Again, this announcement is only in relation to the Soonaverse application. Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to all of the incredible opportunities we are working towards together.