TruStory, a platform for users to research and validate claims aiming to “bring authenticity back into the digital and decentralized world,” is shutting down and returning the money to investors.
TruStory founder, Preethi Kasireddy on whom everyone was betting on announced this on twitter, “TLDR; We came to the conclusion that TruStory is too early to market. The market is not big enough (yet) for what we want to build.”
A USC grad, Kasireddy worked as a banking analyst with Goldman Sachs and after less than a year took a role in Andreessen Horowitz’s deal group. During her tenure at the venture capital firm, she learned everything about blockchain.
And she started with what she calls a “massive ambition.”
It is a digital debate game where anyone can participate in a TruStory debate by staking a token called TRU. The purpose of this token was to reward positive contributors, and publish negative contributors in the manner that writing, upvoting or downvoting an argument requires one to stake TRU. The token would have also been used to moderate the platform.
In May 2018, TruStory raised $3 million in seed funding led by True Venture with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Wonder Ventures, Homebrew, Abstract Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and Dream Machine.
In a blog post on Thursday, She explained how it is “Too early for 3.0 and too late for web 2.0,” further detailing that tokenization is too hard along with the regulatory and compliance risk. She also states that the infrastructure for such a platform is not ready and they don’t have a market (consumers) either.
Overall, Kasireddy said that the market timing for the project is what “makes it difficult to turn it into sustainable business on its own.”
