Nifty Gateway Has Shut Down, But Nfts Are Not Dead-They Are Evolving The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Nifty Gateway's Shutdown Rekindles the NFT“Collapse” Narrative, but Artists and Dealers Say the Market Has Simply Moved

When Nifty Gateway announced it would permanently close on February 23, it landed like another obituary in a market many casual observers already consider finished. The once-prominent NFT exchange, launched in 2020, is the latest in a string of platforms to go dark, following KnownOrigin, LG Art Lab, and MakersPlace - the service provider that helped power Christie's headline-making $69.3 million sale of Beeple's“Everydays: The First 5000 Days” in March 2021.

The timing has only sharpened the sense of retreat. Around the closure, the crypto sector endured what was described as the most severe sell-off in its history. Bitcoin fell more than 40% between September 2025 and early February 2026, dipping below $70,000 for the first time since Donald Trump's re-election. Ether, the currency most closely tied to the Ethereum blockchain that underpins much NFT activity, also declined sharply, alongside other major coins.

For the blockchain art trade, none of this reads as good news. Yet across the ecosystem, artists, dealers, and specialists argue that the story is less a collapse than a reconfiguration - and that the most visible marketplaces were never the whole market.

“Galleries close and open over the years,” says Adam Heft Berninger, founder of New York's Heft Gallery, which has positioned itself at the intersection of contemporary art and emerging technology. While NFT marketplaces are not galleries in the traditional sense, he suggests the comparison is useful: closures can signal churn inside an active field rather than a definitive end.

Others see Nifty Gateway's demise as more than ordinary turnover. Muriel Quancard, an appraiser and consultant specializing in digital art, argues that the platform's policies alienated committed crypto-art participants. Among the concerns she cites are practices that blurred on-chain provenance for works minted through the platform and discouraged users from moving assets off-site.

“Nifty Gateway managed to unravel the very things blockchain and NFTs were designed to uphold: verifiable authorship, sovereignty and decentralisation,” Quancard says.

A key point, insiders add, is that“NFTs” are often treated as a single genre when they are better understood as a set of different artistic and technical approaches with distinct dependencies.“People still talk about NFTs as if they're a single category,” Quancard says.“In reality, there are many different artistic and technical forms with different dependencies.”

The public image of tokenized art remains tethered to a narrow band of highly legible, highly traded projects: pop-culture-forward work by Beeple, or mass series like Bored Ape Yacht Club. Multiple experts still see value in those objects - if only as artifacts of a specific cultural moment - but they argue that the market's center of gravity has shifted away from the loudest, most speculative formats.

For some artists, that shift has meant stepping back from platform-driven“drops” and returning to slower, more controlled distribution. The artist duo LoVid - Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus - describe a period of intense energy in 2021 and 2022, when they found“enthusiasm, momentum and support for a wide variety of NFTs,” including a collection of 400 unique works released on Art Blocks. But they have paused large-scale releases.“With very few exceptions, the model of marketplaces and platforms doesn't work for us,” they say.

Since 2024, LoVid has instead offered tokenized works privately, either through brick-and-mortar galleries or directly from the studio. The duo has also begun using NFTs in a more familiar art-world role: as certificates of authenticity paired with physical and time-based media.“Recently, we also have been including NFTs as certificates of authenticity combined with paintings, photographs and video,” they write.

The implication is not that the NFT market is immune to macro shocks - the recent crypto downturn has clearly tightened liquidity and dampened risk appetite - but that the most durable activity may now be happening away from the biggest exchanges. In this view, the next phase of blockchain art looks less like a casino floor and more like the conventional art trade: relationship-driven, selectively distributed, and increasingly integrated with objects that can live on a wall as easily as on a chain.

As platforms shutter and prices swing, the question for collectors and institutions may be less whether NFTs“survive” than which uses of tokenization prove meaningful over time - and which were always destined to be a brief, expensive spectacle.

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