We’re so grateful for the support and adoption we’ve seen over the past year from our community, and we’re happy to share that the Optimism Foundation has enabled Quix to open source our code on behalf of the Optimism Community. This means that while Quix is winding down as a company, our code will become freely available for the community to leverage and build with, starting January 6, 2023!
We're working with the Optimism Foundation to ensure a smooth transition, and our team is committed to maintaining operations through February 28, 2023. You can read below for full details of how we arrived here, as well as what this means for NFT creators and collectors on our platform.
About a year ago, we were a team of 4 running a small NFT company. We were getting crushed by gas fees. Seeing that on-chain innovation required much more scale, we decided to make it our mission to accelerate the adoption of layer 2 scaling technologies.
Inspired by the Optimistic vision, we made a big bet on Optimism. We refocused our entire startup on a new product—an NFT marketplace on Optimism called Quix (then called Quixotic). We launched in December 2021. At the time, the NFT ecosystem was very small, and we were the only place to trade Optimism NFTs.
Over the next 10 months, we put all of our efforts behind growing the ecosystem. We created the first no-code NFT launchpad in the ecosystem. It was used to launch many of the most well-known OP NFT projects today—BoredTown, Oliens, Motorheads, Ganland and more.
We worked directly with teams at Mirror, RabbitHole, CoinGecko, CryptoTesters, Zapper, SimpleHash, Mintplex, and many more to help them integrate Optimism NFTs into their products.
When the OP token launched, we volunteered to be a governance delegate. We’re currently the delegate backed by the most unique addresses.
We built the Optimism ERC-721 bridge, which is now a part of Optimism’s codebase. We overhauled our marketplace so that it’s easy to bridge NFTs to Optimism, and created a strong UX so that collectors feel comfortable trading bridged NFTs just as they would any other NFTs.
For many users, Quix (or a Quix launchpad collection) is the first dapp they use on Optimism. The number of transactions and unique wallets interacting with the OP NFT ecosystem is now substantial—we’re seeing upwards of 4k exchanges per day.
Despite this traction, our monthly infrastructure costs are now exceeding our revenue, and we're running too lean of an operation (currently a team of 3) to be able to invest in the ecosystem in a meaningful way. We’re proud of what we built and how it’s grown, but given the constraints, Quix is no longer a business that we can continue to operate.
Now we turn to the Optimism Collective to usher Quix into its next phase.
With a token grant to retroactively reward our contributions and support ongoing community and platform maintenance through February 28, 2023, the Optimism Foundation has enabled Quix to open source our code on behalf of the Optimism Community. This means the Quix code will be freely available for the community to leverage and build with!
For NFT collectors on Optimism, we’ll soon begin redirecting trading to OpenSea. For NFT creators, the Quix Launchpad will remain available through January 18th. Our team will work directly with Quix API users to help them transition to an alternative solution. We’ll also be working closely with the Optimism Foundation to transition Quix to an open source codebase by January 6th.
As delegates, we’ll continue to participate in Optimism’s governance in the short term, but encourage token holders who delegated to the Quix team to redelegate to others.
We remain optimistic for the future of the NFT ecosystem, and we’re grateful for the relationships and connections we’ve built over the past year!