Billed as San Francisco’s first members-only NFT-based club and restaurant, SHŌ Club broke ground in Salesforce Park last August in a ceremony filled with sake, champagne and golden shovels.
What happened to that Bougie SF club offering $300,000 NFT memberships?
Since the high-profile announcement, progress on the bustling tech and kitchen collaboration — which was set to charge up to $300,000 for membership — appears to have stalled, according to reporting from SFGATE.
SHŌ Group, the conceptualizer of the Japanese-inspired restaurant and glittering clubhouse where NFTs will gatekeep access, has said it expects to open in the fall of 2023. But construction on the project has not moved forward since prospective members and the media were feted with fresh sushi, sake cocktails and Japanese whiskey highballs last August.
“I recently went over to Salesforce Park and looked into the shell of the building that will become a restaurant; I saw an empty space that looks almost exactly like it did in August,” SFGATE’s Alex Schultz wrote, adding that permits for SHŌ’s restaurant have not yet been issued due to a lack of response to notes from San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection.
The group has not updated its Social Media accounts since September, and SFGATE observed that events for the club, including quarterly membership meetings, have been scrubbed from SHŌ’s website. According to SFGATE, SHŌ Group appears to have sold around 100 NFT memberships, far fewer than the 3,275 originally estimated.
Although SHŌ’s less-than-stellar numbers could be explained by the well-publicized collapse of non-fungible tokens and the cryptocurrency market on which it was largely based.
Around the time of SHŌ Club’s groundbreaking, the organization offered three levels of membership, starting at $7,500 and moving up to $300,000 for perks such as valet parking, private car service and monthly omakase dinners with celebrity guests. Top-tier Four members were also eligible for “a once-in-a-lifetime highly curated trip to Japan,” according to a press release shared at the time.
The Standard contacted SHŌ Group and Sigel, but they did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a June 2022 interview with The Standard, SHŌ Group founder and CEO Joshua Sigel told The Standard that the intention of SHŌ’s NFT-based membership is to provide long-term value for members and “bridge the Web2 and Web3 worlds.”
He said he hoped future members could “look back and say, ‘Man, that was a great investment. I’m really glad I got in on this early because these are in high demand and there’s a very strong resale market for it .’
Siegal also predicted that NFTs would become more common, democratic and accessible over time, appearing in everything from concert tickets to grocery stores—a retail concept SHŌ was also exploring at the time—and expressed confidence in the technology.
“We really believe that NFTs are not some kind of nebulous thing,” Sigel said.
Christina Campodonico can be reached at [email protected]
