Dear Tale Wallet Community,

It is with a mix of emotions that we announce the sunset of Tale Wallet.

Tale Wallet began with the mission to provide utility to retail users and businesses in the DeFi space. While we garnered valuable insights with traction on defi investment instruments like crypto baskets and crypto funds, we also had to consider the trajectory of the company and a realistically achievable path to scale and push this to the next level.

Hence, after thoroughly considering various factors like market conditions and recent events, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue further development of Tale Wallet.

Recap of our Journey

Our journey started in August 2022 with NFTVerse - a tokenization as a service platform for brands. We had direct access of 100+ brands through our partners and we could raise our pre-seed round of funding. However, after the FTX collapse in November 2022, our partners and brands withdrew due to tough macro conditions and poor market sentiment.

That’s when we pivoted to DeFi. We started focusing on Tale wallet which was built as an embedded wallet initially. Keeping Tale Wallet as the front brand, we started building infrastructure of passive investment instruments like Crypto Baskets, Crypto Funds and Crypto Indexes.

To identify the right set of audience we conducted a few offline events in residential areas in Bengaluru to gauge the interest of retails users. We quickly came to the conclusion that the early adoptor in the retail user section was absorbed by exchanges like CoinDCX, WazirX in India and Binance, Coinbase at global level. Going after the remaining set of retail users meant a direct competition with already established brands and we wanted to avoid that.

Hence we looked at another angle of approaching users (potential defi investors) via Financial distributors. There are more than 2.5M financial distributors who distributes mutual funds, insurence, loans, and other financial instruments to the masses in India alone.
We approached them with emails and cold calls. We arranged a few meetings in which we tried to educate them about crypto as an asset class and got back to them with an early version of tool that they could use to diversify their client's portfolios to include cryptos and NFTs.

However, we faced two major challenges:

1. Low Trust Among Financial Distributors: The perception of crypto as a speculative asset and the negative stance of the Indian government's meant it would require significant educational efforts with little immediate impact.
    
2. Poor Unit Economics: Building a tool for financial distributors seemend to be profitable either at scale or through a profit-sharing model. Charging only a platform fee was not a viable business model in which angel or seed investors seemed interested in.

These challenges forced us to reconsider our market approach.

Tale Invest, DeFi All the Way

By December 2023 we were in touch with a lot more DeFi players. It was at this time that we met Foundership, a blockchain-based accelerator program in Bengaluru, and decided to become a part of their LaunchCamp5 batch that was starting in January.

After talking to Foundership and several other players in the Defi space we understood that we could initially just focus on building a complete Defi product for passive investment and target the existing 400M crypto investors.
 

These users did not need education on blockchain and crypto assets but they cared about complete onchain transparency and self-custody.
 

We felt we could focus on just consumer-side investment instruments like a crypto basket or crypto fund and build a community around them as long as the solution was in complete agreement with the defi principles of ‘Don’t Trust, Verify’. 

The wallet product that we had could be used for initial lunch and later we could partner with other wallets for discovery.

The entire unit economics of the product could also be wrapped into a token and if we had the initial community we could do a Token Generation Event in sometime and later scale the entire thing.
 

Hence, we shifted to start building the Tale Invest brand and worked on making two initial investment instrument where user could invest passively with self-custody and onchain transparency. We planned to get to the MVP stage and approach investors in the Dubai 2049 event which was happening in April 2024.

However, the April market crash crushed our hopes and the Dubai trip didn’t bring any positive results.. A few investors we spoke to talked to us for a month or two with hopes of the macro and crypto market recovering but eventually decided to double down on saving their existing startups.

We also got in touch with 5-6 prominent chains and looked into whether we could scale our product and community of 5000 users on Twitter with their grant support but that too didn’t seem to be getting results. Some of the chains wanted us to wait and join their acceleration program which was to start 3-5 months down the line while others were open only to cross-marketing after we had crossed a certain threshold of daily active users. The remaining grant programs were not big enough. We had previously secured a grant from the Polygon Village Grant program in January but these grants were not big enough to get us to the next stage.

There was still hope as there always is for eternally optimistic founders but then came the final blow when the WazirX hack happened in July 2024. Almost INR 2000 Cr worth of crypto had been wiped off and this meant even lower trust of Indian Investors in crypto. Besides the macro didn’t seem supportive, we had incurred heavy losses to our portfolio and the Indian government's stance on crypto was still considerably negative with 1% TDS and 30% tax without a loss settlement for the 2024-2025 budget.
 

Hence with a heavy heart, we finally decided to take the pragmatic decision on sunsetting the Tale Wallet brand at the end of July 2024 so that we could focus elsewhere.

As we are shutting the Tale Wallet Brand now, our users become our top priority. We will make sure that our current users have enough time to take their funds out.

For our existing customers, we assure you that our service will remain operational for at least 6 more months. We encourage you to transfer your funds and assets from Tale Wallet to alternative services or withdraw them as needed. Details are available in the link below:

How to port your account from Tale Wallet to meta mask [https://blog.talewallet.com/post/69/Porting-Tale-Wallet-to-other-Defi-Wallet]

How to sell your asset in Tale Wallet [https://blog.talewallet.com/post/67/How-to-Sell-your-cryptos-from-Tale-Wallet]

Tech Acquisition

We are grateful to one of our investors who is acquiring the wallet infrastructure we built for his new startup. A separate announcement will be made on this soon.