Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’ crypto exchange Gemini has announcement the closure of Nifty Gateway, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace that the exchange previously acquired in 2019. Nifty Gateway is currently operating in withdrawal-only mode and the platform will permanently close on February 26.
“This move will allow Gemini to further focus and realize its vision of creating a unique super app for customers,” Gemini’s announcement said.
NFTs have become a key part of the crypto market from 2021 to 2022, and Gemini’s competitors Coinbase And Kraken also launched similar markets around this time. Meanwhile, NFT marketplace OpenSea has also burst onto the scene as the darling startup of the crypto industry, ultimately reaching a valuation of $13 billion.
Unfortunately, the NFT market has only trended downward since 2022, and the launches of Coinbase and Kraken have proven to be signs of a frothy and doomed market. Coinbase closed its NFT marketplace in 2024 After initially denying that it would be closed the previous year. Kraken also closed its marketplace in 2024, amid a lack of demand for crypto collectibles. OpenSea recently rotated to become a multi-chain crypto trading aggregator.
At the height of the NFT hype, people were paying tens of millions of dollars for NFTs like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes Yacht Club, with support 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 effectively investable assets without any sort of warning of potential losses to an unsuspecting public.
Eventually, a large number of celebrities were named a trial related to the Bored Ape NFT part. An OpenSea employee was also charged with insider trading and sentenced to three months in prison.
The CryptoSlam 500 NFT Indexwhich 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 that weekly sales fell from more than $1 billion in 2021 and 2021 to less than $60 million in the first two weeks of 2026.
Recently, the most notable story surrounding an NFT was a marketing stunt by Coinbase involving the removal of one such token worth $25 million. While insider trading remains a concern in crypto outside of NFTs, whether related to memecoinswhich have largely replaced NFTs, or a company acquired by Coinbase with which a token was associated.
Just like following NFTs, lawsuits are underway regarding various memecoin rugpulls where celebrities, as the girl “Hawk Tuah”were allegedly used to create exit liquidity for token creators. Earlier this month, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams was accused to operate a similar system. Of course, the active crypto entrepreneur that he isPresident Trump was able to profit from both NFTs and memecoins.
Efforts have also been made to bring additional credibility to the NFT space by bringing them back to the world’s largest and most decentralized crypto network, Bitcoin, and integrating the actual images into the blockchain rather than pointing to image files elsewhere on the internet. Although this effort created some controversy regarding the prevalence of perceived spam on the Bitcoin network, this type of projects, such as those based on Ordinal registration protocolhave achieved nothing comparable to the success seen during the 2021 to 2022 period.
Coinbase and Gemini said their NFT functionality was integrated into their “everything for apps” products; However, it is clear that these digital tokens have not turned out to be all that crypto platforms had hoped for when initially investing time and resources into them. Of course, because NFTs have their own centralized issuers, they also come with some of the same a centralization baggage that is increasingly found and criticized in the crypto industry these days.
That said, while the overrated use cases touted by Mark Cuban and others during the NFT bubble never came to fruition, it is clear that there are still some amateurs, like those who are still trading Rare Pepes launched in 2016who will continue to have fun collecting, issuing and trading these digital collectibles, even if not on the scale that was once imagined. After all, people still collect Beanie Babies.
