Crypto exchange ShapeShift to shut down Prism in October

Leading cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift has announced that Prism, its trustless portfolio market platform, will shut down next month.

ShapeShift launched Prism in closed beta last year. The platform aimed to give users access to portfolios of digital assets without trusting counterparty.

Prism’s official website now displays the announcement:

“Prism is shutting down soon. The site will be live until 10/11/2018. We highly encourage you to close out your Prisms during this time. After this 30 day period we will be shutting down the site and auto-closing all remaining Prisms, sending your Ether automatically back to the address you created your Prism with.”

The announcement was quite startling, especially as the platform was set to launch in a couple of weeks, noted AMBCrypto.

“With the work we’ve done over these past 18 months, it’s become clear to us that there is actually a different (and likely superior) product to be built with this underlying technology. It requires more than a pivot: a reimagining of the product itself,” ShapeShift said in an online post.

The company said that it is shutting down Prism to focus on its core platform and to “clear the pallet for a potential reimagining of what this technology can do later on.”

Recently, ShapeShift announced that it is introducing a loyalty program called the Shapeshift Membership, which marks the platform’s departure from its previous model of acting as “the exchange without accounts.”