Social NFT marketplace Rodeo has become the second NFT platform this week to announce it is shutting down, underscoring the ongoing challenges facing the nonfungible token market.
Launched on Apple’s iOS App Store in March last year, Rodeo positioned itself as a social-media-driven NFT platform, prioritizing creator rewards and community engagement over traditional buying and selling. The app aimed to make NFT collecting more accessible to mainstream users by abstracting away much of the complexity associated with crypto and blockchain technology.
Despite these efforts, Rodeo struggled to scale to a level that would make the business sustainable. In a post on X on Tuesday, CEO and co-founder Kayvon Tehranian said the platform ultimately fell short of that goal.
“We believed collecting could be playful and communal — not just transactional. That belief guided every product decision we made,” he wrote.
“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.”
Rodeo has laid out a wind-down plan to help users migrate their assets and data to other platforms. As part of the process, users will be able to transfer their media and metadata to blockchain data storage platform Arweave.
The company will also introduce an asset migration assistant to guide users through transferring assets from Rodeo’s smart contract. The platform will continue operating normally until Feb. 10, after which it will move into read-only mode. Rodeo is scheduled to fully shut down on March 10.
The closure follows another organizational change announced by CEO and co-founder Kayvon Tehranian earlier this week. On Tuesday, Tehranian revealed that ownership of the NFT artist platform and gallery Foundation is being transferred to digital art platform Blackdove.
Tehranian said Foundation began as an experiment to determine whether artists could be fairly compensated for their work online, noting that the platform has facilitated $230 million in primary sales since launch. He added that Foundation will continue to operate as normal under new leadership focused on its long-term future.
The broader NFT market has struggled to recover since a major downturn in 2022, experiencing only brief price spikes with no sustained rebound. At its peak in January 2022, Ethereum-based NFT trading volume reached nearly $5 billion, according to CryptoSlam data. By January 2026, that figure had fallen to just $159.2 million.
Nifty Gateway updates wind-down plan
Meanwhile, Nifty Gateway—one of the largest marketplaces to emerge during the NFT boom of 2021—has updated its shutdown plans following community feedback.
In a post on X on Tuesday, the platform said it will also use Arweave to enable users to migrate media and metadata. Nifty Gateway is extending its asset-withdrawal deadline to a 90-day window, moving it to April 23 from the previously announced Feb. 23 cutoff.
“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,” the company said.
Nifty Gateway first announced plans to close on Friday but did not explicitly state the reasons behind the decision.
