Rodeo becomes 2nd NFT platform to announce closure this week

Social NFT marketplace Rodeo has become the second NFT platform this week to announce its closure amid a tough market climate for nonfungible tokens.

Rodeo launched via Apple’s iOS store in March last year and was designed to be a social-media-focused NFT collecting platform, with an emphasis on creators getting rewarded for posting over purely buying and selling NFTs. 

It utilized complex crypto and blockchain features to make it simple for mainstream users. 

However, Rodeo CEO and co-founder Kayvon Tehranian said in an X post on Tuesday that the platform had struggled to scale enough to become sustainable. 

“We believed collecting could be playful and communal — not just transactional. That belief guided every product decision we made,” he wrote, adding: 

“Ultimately, Rodeo didn’t achieve its core objective. While the product resonated deeply with a committed community, it didn’t grow to the scale required for the platform to be sustainable long-term. Because of that, continuing to operate Rodeo is not possible.”

Moving forward, Rodeo has outlined a plan for users to move their assets and data to other platforms. Firstly, users will be able to transfer media and metadata to the blockchain data storage platform Arweave.

Rodeo will also provide an asset migration assistant, guiding users on how to transfer assets from the platform’s smart contract. 

Between Jan. 27 and Feb. 10, Rodeo will continue to function as usual, but from Feb. 10, the platform will switch to read-only mode. By March 10, Rodeo will be switched off completely. 

This isn’t the only organizational shift Tehranian has made this week, revealing on Tuesday that ownership of the NFT artist platform and gallery Foundation is being transferred to digital art platform Blackdove. 

Tehranian said the project started as an experiment to see if artists could be fairly compensated for their work online, and oversaw $230 million worth of primary sales since launch. 

The founder said the platform will continue as normal, but under a leadership committed to the long-term future.

The NFT market has been in a free fall since the major crash in 2022, with only short price spikes and no sustained market resurgence. At the market peak around January 2022, Ethereum hosted almost $5 billion worth of NFT trading volume, according to CryptoSlam data. 

In January 2026, however, Ethereum had seen just $159.2 million worth of NFT trading volume. 

Nifty Gateway updates wind-down plan

Meanwhile, Nifty Gateway, one of the biggest marketplaces to emerge as part of the early NFT market boom in early 2021, has provided an update on its winding-down process after recent community feedback. 

In a post on X on Tuesday, Nifty Gateway also said it will utilize Arweave for users to transfer media and metadata. Additionally, the platform is extending its deadline for moving assets to a 90-day window, ending on April 23 instead of Feb. 23. 

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“We are working on a bulk withdrawal tool for our customers who have multiple NFTs on our platform and will be rolling it out shortly with plenty of time to use the tool before the April 23 deadline,” Nifty Gateway said. 

The platform initially announced plans to close down on Friday, but did not explicitly outline the reasons why. 

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