Winklevoss Twins Shut Down NFT Marketplace In Another Sign Crypto Art Is Dead
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’ crypto exchange, Gemini, has announced the closure of Nifty Gateway, a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace where the exchange was previously founded in 2019. Nifty Gateway is currently operating in withdrawal mode only, and the platform will be closed on February 26.
“This decision will allow Gemini to strengthen its focus and implement the vision of building a single top super app for customers,” said an announcement from Gemini.
NFTs became the main focus of the crypto market from 2021 to 2022, and Gemini’s competitors Coinbase and Kraken also launched similar markets during that time. During this time, NFT marketplace OpenSea also burst onto the scene as the first darling of the crypto industry, eventually reaching a valuation of $13 billion.
Unfortunately, the NFT market has only looked down since 2022, and the launches from Coinbase and Kraken turned out to be signs of a bubble-filled, lost market. Coinbase has closed its NFT market in 2024 after initially denying that it would close last year. Kraken also closed its market in 2024, amid a lack of demand for crypto collections. OpenSea has recently dedicated itself to becoming 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 endorsements from a long list of celebrities from Tom Brady to Paris Hilton. Hilton’s support of NFTs on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon was a particularly noteworthy cultural moment in the digital arts, although it was also heavily criticized for promoting what was effectively an asset without any kind of warning of potential losses to an unsuspecting public.
Finally, a number of celebrities were named in a lawsuit related to a portion of 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, has fallen 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 few weeks of 2026.
Recently, the most notable story about NFT was Coinbase’s marketing stunt involving the removal of one such token worth $25 million. Although insider trading is still a concern in crypto outside of NFTs, whether it’s related to memecoins, which largely replace NFTs, or the company that Coinbase acquired that had an associated token.
Similar to the effects of NFTs, there are ongoing lawsuits regarding various memecoin rugpulls where celebrities, such as the “Hawk Tuah” girl, were allegedly used to create cash outflows for token creators. Earlier this month, former New York City Mayor Eric Adams was accused of using a similar scheme. Of course, active crypto entrepreneur he is not, President Trump was able to make money from both NFTs and memecoins.
There have also been efforts to bring more credibility to the NFT space by bringing them back to the world’s largest and most decentralized crypto network, Bitcoin, and embedding real images on the blockchain rather than pointing to image files elsewhere on the internet. Although this effort has created a debate about the spread of spam considered in the Bitcoin network, these types of projects, such as those based on the regulation of Ordinals Inscriptions, have not achieved anything close to the success seen in the period of 2021 to 2022.
Both Coinbase and Gemini have stated that their NFT functionality is being rolled out to their “everything app” products; however, it is clear that these digital tokens have not been everything that crypto platforms had hoped for when they initially invested time and resources into them. Of course, since NFTs have their own centralized issuers, they also come with some of the same centralization burdens that are increasingly being found and criticized in the crypto industry these days.
With all of this being said, while the cases of overuse made by Mark Cuban and others during the NFT bubble never materialized, it is clear that there are still enthusiasts, such as those who still trade the Rare Pepes launched in 2016, who will continue to have fun collecting, releasing, and trading these digital collectibles—even if not nearly as much as once imagined. After all, people still collect Beanie Babies, too.
