You know what’s cooler than a million dollars? A .jpeg that’s been cataloged on an immutable blockchain that no one wants to buy.
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’s crypto exchange, Gemini, has announced the closure of Nifty Gateway, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace that the exchange had previously acquired in 2019. Nifty Gateway is currently operating in withdrawal-only mode, and the platform will be closing for good on February 26th.
“This decision will allow Gemini to sharpen its focus and execute on the vision of building a one-stop super app for customers,” said the announcement from Gemini.
NFTs became a key focus of the crypto market from 2021 to 2022, and Gemini competitors Coinbase and Kraken also launched similar marketplaces around that time. During this time, NFT marketplace OpenSea had also burst onto the scene as a startup darling of the crypto industry, eventually reaching a valuation of $13 billion.
Unfortunately, the NFT market has only moved in a downward direction since 2022, and the launches from Coinbase and Kraken turned out to be signs of a frothy, doomed market. Coinbase shuttered its NFT marketplace in 2024 after initially denying that it would be closed down the previous year. Kraken also shut down its marketplace in 2024, amidst a lack of demand for the crypto collectibles. OpenSea recently pivoted to becoming a multi-chain crypto trading aggregator.
At the peak of the NFT hype, people were paying tens of millions of dollars for NFTs like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes Yacht Club, with endorsements from a long list of celebrities from Tom Brady to Paris Hilton. Hilton’s support for NFTs on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon was a particularly notable cultural moment for digital art, although it was also heavily criticized for promoting what were effectively investable assets without any sort of warning of potential losses to an unsuspecting public.
Eventually, a large number of celebrities were named in a lawsuit related to the portion of the Bored Ape NFTs. An OpenSea employee was also charged with insider trading and sentenced to three months in prison.
The CryptoSlam 500 NFT Index, which tracks the largest NFT projects on any blockchain, is down 98.98% since its launch four years ago. In terms of sales volume, data from The Block shows weekly sales dropping from more than $1 billion in 2021 and 2021 to less than $60 million in the first couple weeks of 2026.
Recently, the most notable story regarding an NFT was a marketing stunt by Coinbase involving the deletion of one such token worth $25 million. Although insider trading is still a concern in crypto outside of NFTs, whether it be related to memecoins, which largely took the place of NFTs, or a company acquired by Coinbase that had a token associated with it.
Much like the aftermath of NFTs, there are ongoing lawsuits regarding various memecoin rugpulls where celebrities, such as the “Hawk Tuah” girl, were allegedly used to create exit liquidity for token creators. Earlier this month, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams was accused of operating a similar scheme. Of course, the active crypto entrepreneur that he is, President Trump was able to cash in on both NFTs and memecoins.
There have also been efforts to bring added credibility to the NFT space by bringing them back to the world’s largest and most decentralized crypto network, Bitcoin, and embedding the actual images in the blockchain rather than pointing to image files elsewhere on the internet. While this effort has created some controversy regarding the prevalence of perceived spam on the Bitcoin network, these sorts of projects, such as those based on the Ordinals Inscriptions protocol, have not achieved anything close to the success seen in the 2021 to 2022 era.
Both Coinbase and Gemini have stated their NFT functionality is being rolled into their “everything app” products; however, it’s clear these digital tokens did not turn out to be everything the crypto platforms had hoped when originally investing time and resources into them. Of course, with NFTs having centralized issuers of their own, they also come with some of the same centralization baggage that is increasingly being found and criticized in the crypto industry these days.
With all this said, while the overhyped use cases touted by Mark Cuban and others during the NFT bubble never came to fruition, it’s clear that there are still some hobbyists, such as those still trading Rare Pepes launched in 2016, who will continue to have fun collecting, issuing, and trading these digital collectibles — even if not at nearly the scale that was once imagined. After all, people still collect Beanie Babies, too.
