Sometimes you have to shelve projects and come back later. Determination won't get you anywhere if all your dependencies and the market aren't ready for what you're building. Snap tried glasses too and went nowhere. Meta got lucky that multi-modal models provide a more compelling use case for smart glasses.
In retrospect, shelving & coming back isn’t quitting. I agree that if timing isn’t right you might have to pause but google’s ever growing graveyard of products that never get an alternative is giving up. Snap continues to pursue AR, even though the predecessor products were flops. Apple eventually got their PDA.
I bootstrapped a PoC of meTokens in 2020. It got some meaningful traction with the RaidGuild community, but the market quieted down and it ultimately stagnated for about 6 months. I shelved it until the market came back in 2021. We raised and eventually built the full protocol, which we never could've done w/o capital.