Non Fungible Finance (NFF), a key team contributing to the Backed ecosystem, has decided to wind down operations. The onchain work we’ve helped create—the Backed protocol, community NFT, and paprMEME—will continue to live on, but the interfaces operated by NFF (withbacked.xyz, papr.wtf) will wind down at the end of August 2023.

It’s been an exciting last 18 months working in the NFT finance space. Backed started as a Coinbase 10% Project in November of 2021, and the four founders left Coinbase to work full-time on supporting the Backed protocol ecosystem in April 2022. After which, we assisted in launching a community NFT in July 2022, sharing the papr whitepaper in November 2022, and launching paprMEME in February 2023. We are really proud of what we’ve shipped and how much we accomplished in a short time.

The papr protocol is the best design we came across for how to improve NFT-backed loans, and we’re very happy with how many of the ideas have played out. However, after seeing it live for 5 months, we’ve concluded there isn’t enough demand to maintain the interfaces or continue development work. There is lots of exciting and important work happening in crypto right now, and the four team members are excited to join other teams and continue to push the space forward.

If you are a user of these interfaces, you do not need to take any immediate action. You will be able to continue to use these interfaces till the end of August. After that, you can continue to interact with these protocols via other interfaces (or perhaps new instances, deployed by others, of the interfaces NFF has built).

We are super grateful to all the users, friends, and community members for their support and interest in our work. Especially Coinbase Ventures for their support. Our code is open source and free to use, and we hope that it will inspire new and better products in the future.

Yours,
adamgobes, cnasc, jringenberg, wilsoncusack