Basis, the cryptocurrency project that once made headlines is shutting down. The company was previously known as Basecoin and had raised $133 million through venture capital earlier this year. The fund was intended to be used towards developing a stablecoin, a type of cryptocurrency whose price remains fixed and is not affected by market volatility.

The company released an official statement on its website, announcing that the company is shutting down. Furthermore, it says that the remaining funds will be returned to investors. Some notable companies that that invested in Basis include Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and GV, the venture capital division of Alphabet, which also happens to be Google’s parent company.

Salil Deshpande, an investor at Bain Capital Ventures led the investment round in Basis. He said that Basis tried to make the required changes to comply with U.S regulations and security laws, however, they concluded that it wasn’t a viable option.

Deshpande said

“The team explored a whole bunch of alternatives for what to do about this. To make an analogy, if you’re playing tennis and you decide, instead of tennis rackets, you want to start using tiny, little paddles, and instead of a tennis ball you want to start using a small plastic ball, and then you want to play on a table instead of a tennis court, at some point along that way it stops being tennis and starts becoming ping pong,”

As per Deshpande’s analogy, every change in the Basis system made it look more like existing stablecoins in the market such as Tether, the Gemini Dollar and even USD Coin.

“There was some hope and some assumption that the regulatory environment would be a little more favorable to the bond tokens and share tokens than it actually was,”

This news was first reported by the Block.