ZapChain, a bitcoin-powered content monetization startup headquartered in San Francisco, has announced that it will soon cease all of its operations.

“ZapChain will be shutting down on, or shortly after. August 31, 2016. Please withdraw your balance”, the announcement reads.

The announcement follows the startup’s seed funding round in which it raised $350,000 last November. The funding round saw participation from venture capitalist partner Tim Draper, Boost VC founder and CEO Adam Draper and the Boost Bitcoin Fund.

The decision to shutdown ZapChain was first revealed by CTO Adam McKenna in an online post in June. He said that the platform is shutting down as it is unable to obtain additional funding for development and hosting costs.

“ZapChain doesn't really use much in the way of server resources, and keeping the status quo does not take up a ton of our time, so we were planning to keep the site going on the side, but our backend databse provider (Parse) is being shut down by Facebook by January, so within the next six months we would need to completely rewrite the DB backend in order to keep things going.  Unfortunately neither Matt nor I have the time to do this in our off hours, and we both need to work full-time to keep ourselves and our families/kids/SO's fed, clothed, housed and happy in general.”

McKenna, however, suggested creating ZapChain v2 – the OSS version, which would keep branding and trademarks specific to the ZapChain site, but create a white labeled, fully documented, admin-friendly version that anyone could use to set up their own "Powered by ZapChain" forum with integrated tipping. He further said:

“Currently I haven't heard from anyone who wants to work on it [the OSS version].  Unless I hear from anyone else within the next two weeks, I'm going to pick a framework and work on it myself, but if I don't get most of the functionality and the new backend done by January (when Parse shuts down for good), then we'll have to shut down the site for a while until it's finished.”

Details on this new project remain unclear at the moment.