A Farewell to Turtle

Today we are sharing the news that we have decided to sunset Turtle. This decision comes after reflecting on the evolving landscape of the Polkadot ecosystem and the shifting priorities within the space. Effective February 15, Turtle will officially close its operations.

We started Turtle with a bold vision: to build the effortless, neat, and seamless app needed to move any token from any place within and through Polkadot. We saw teams reinventing the wheel to navigate complex architectures, often at the expense of their own product roadmaps. Our goal was to abstract that complexity, providing a single, intuitive interface for moving assets into, out of, and across the ecosystem. Over time, we facilitated more than $10 million in volume and became a preferred tool for developers and users alike.

However, the environment has changed. With several parachains migrating away and a strategic shift in the ecosystem toward product-led initiatives by Parity, tools like Turtle have become deprioritized by the ecosystem's core drivers. We built the plumbing, but the necessary growth drivers to keep the faucet running are no longer there. As a result, we believe Velocity's resources are better focused on new challenges where we can have a more significant impact.

We want to express our deepest gratitude to our partners, especially ParaSpell, who were amazing throughout this journey, as well as Snowbridge, Parity, and the Web3 Foundation. Most importantly, we thank every user and developer who believed in our vision. Your support fueled our work, and we truly appreciate you riding the waves with us. The codebase will remain open source and we welcome contributions from anyone interested in its continued development.

The Velocity Team.