The NFT market was dealt another critical blow last week when one of its signature platforms, Nifty Gateway, announced plans to cease operations this year.

The popular NFT marketplace was launched by twins Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster in 2018, then acquired a year later by Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange founded by a separate set of tech twins: Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. The platform hit a new level of notoriety in April of 2021, when it partnered with Sotheby’s to sell $17m worth of NFTs by the digital artist Pak, capping a 12-month period during which the company reported $300m in Gross Merchandise Value.

But much has happened since then. Nifty Gateway’s website, a once-bustling hub of NFT sales, now comprises just a single black-and-white page with a sobering message at the top: “Nifty Gateway platform will be closing on April 23, 2026 and has entered withdrawal-only mode. Please withdraw your assets by this date.”

The news of Nifty Gateway’s collapse epitomizes just how far the market for NFTs has fallen since its peak in the lockdown years of 2021 and 2022.

Back then, “non-fungible tokens, or digital artworks verified on a blockchain, were being swapped for hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency. Artists made them. Celebrities flaunted them. Auction houses parlayed the craze into big business, with Christie’s selling one—Beeple‘s The First 5000 Days—for a whopping $69.3 million in 2021.

Now, due to a staggering discrepancy between supply (huge) and demand (little), reports suggest that as much as 95% of NFTs are worth nothing.

Will the NFT market ever return to health? Outlook not so good.

The decline in the average sale price of a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT since the series's lifetime peak, per data from crypto analytics platform DappRadar. BAYC tokens hit a mean price of more than $571,000 on April 1, 2022; as of last Thursday (January 29), the same metric had plunged to just $13,500.

Although BAYC wasn’t the first PFP (“profile pic”) project to soar to blue-chip prices on the secondary market—that distinction probably belongs to the CryptoPunks—the steep decline in demand for these 10,000 cartoon apes is still one of the best present-day indicators of how far the broader NFT market has fallen.

Their collapse in price is only one part of the story. Only a few years ago, the most prestigious auction houses in the world were not only offering BAYC tokens but also being handsomely rewarded for it. Christie’s sold a trio of them for £982,500 (with fees)—around $1.3m at the time—in an October 2021 evening sale in London. Sotheby’s made $24.4m (with fees) on a single lot of 101 apes and digital accoutrements in an online auction one month earlier. (Please don’t ask me, a grizzled veteran of NFT reportage, to explain the actual function or momentary allure of the six “mutant serums” included in the package. You just had to be there.)

The heady days of six- or seven-figure deals and legacy art market buy-in are long gone now, and there’s little reason to believe they’ll ever come back. But hey, at least $13,500 is better than the current average sale price of a lot of other once-hot NFT series: a big fat zero.

—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market

A student from the Courtauld Institute of Art ASKed: What would you recommend for artists who are trying to navigate the art world on their own without any industry support?

Josh Baer for NoReserve: I would tell them not to go to art school and come out with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt that they can't get back. Friends of mine teach at Columbia and they can't believe their grad students are paying [that much]. The system is broken. What young artists have to do is create their own ecosystem—hanging out at bars, going to each other's studios. The best way to get represented by a gallery is through another artist. If it was my gallery and one of my artists said, ‘Look at this person,’ I'd look because they have a stake in it being good. 

There are new ways of doing it. I'm not sure the tried and true, Yale to MFA show to Chelsea path works as well in a down market where people are a little more conservative. For some people it's networking. Some people are good at that, but not everybody. If you're a quiet intellectual, you have to figure out a different way. How do I get curators to see my stuff? How do I get young writers to look? How do I get other artists to come? If I was an artist, I'd rent a place in Chelsea for a week, a storefront that's empty, and just put my stuff up there. I would be thinking more about guerrilla strategies like that—more independent things to get out there and make it easy for people to see the art.

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