To casual observers of the NFT (non-fungible token) market, the evidence of collapse keeps mounting. But figures across the landscape of blockchain art argue that more than meets the eye is happening in this niche—it just takes a radical reorientation of perspective.
First, the alarm bells. The owners of Nifty Gateway, a once-popular NFT exchange launched in 2020, announced early this year that the platform would shut down for good on 23 February. The move added another entry to a growing list of defunct exchanges, including KnownOrigin, LG Art Lab and MakersPlace—the platform that provided back-end infrastructure for the paradigm-shifting $69.3m sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days at Christie’s in March 2021.
Surrounding Nifty Gateway’s closure, meanwhile, was the most severe sell-off in cryptocurrency history. The value of Bitcoin plunged more than 40% between September 2025 and early February 2026; its price dropped below $70,000 for the first time since the re-election of Donald Trump. Ether, the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain, and other coins were also down sharply over the same period.
Gateway to understanding
None of this is good news for the blockchain art trade. Yet insiders advise that the first mistake would be to overestimate Nifty Gateway’s importance to the current state of NFTs. “Galleries close and open over the years, and while most of these marketplaces and platforms did not operate as a gallery per se, the analogy is indicative of my expectation that changes happen within an active industry,” says Adam Heft Berninger, the founder of New York’s technologically progressive Heft Gallery.
Other experts chalk up Nifty Gateway’s demise to more than just the organic churn of an evolving market. Muriel Quancard, an appraiser and consultant with a speciality in digital art, suggests the platform alienated many true believers in crypto art with its policies, such as muddying the on-chain provenance of NFTs minted there and discouraging users from moving their digital assets elsewhere.
“Nifty Gateway managed to unravel the very things blockchain and NFTs were designed to uphold: verifiable authorship, sovereignty and decentralisation,” she says.
Back to basics
Complicating the reaction to Nifty Gateway’s closure is what some insiders see as a larger, more fundamental misread. “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 popular vision of tokenised work remains yoked to a narrow subset of highly visible pieces—think pop culture-infused art by Beeple and series like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, comprising thousands of colourful cartoon apes. Multiple experts agree that these works have value, including as markers of a particular cultural moment in historical and art-historical time. But they do not represent the totality of crypto-based art.
Other platforms
Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, the artist duo known as LoVid, are one case in point. They told The Art Newspaper by email that they had found “enthusiasm, momentum and support for a wide variety of NFTs” in 2021-22, including a collection of 400 unique works they offered on the Art Blocks platform. But they have—at least for now—stopped doing large-scale drops. “With very few exceptions, the model of marketplaces and platforms doesn’t work for us,” they say. Instead, since 2024, the duo has been privately offering tokenised works through either bricks-and-mortar galleries or directly through the studio. “Recently, we also have been including NFTs as certificates of authenticity combined with paintings, photographs and video,” they write.
Berninger has taken a similar approach at Heft. “Almost all of the work we show has a tokenised component, where the collector receives or can claim a digital artwork whose ownership is recorded on the blockchain: an NFT,” he says—even though he may not always actually use the term “NFT”, he adds.
Quancard also notes that several other “ecosystems” for NFTs and generative art are not only still active but “more artist-friendly” than Nifty Gateway, including OpenSea, Feral File and Tezos. Ultimately, the survivors and the casualties “emphasise the same lesson: platforms come and go, but works and ecosystems built with stewardship and long-term thinking are better positioned to endure”.
