Nifty Gateway is shutting down, and they’re negligently destroying millions of dollars of NFTs One of the first NFT marketplaces before OpenSea, their ethos was to simply copy traditional auction houses. Centralized custodial wallets, credit cards over crypto, web2 servers instead of blockchain infra. Then when the ‘21 NFT bubble hit, they switched from a crypto-minimized calm art site to lavish hyped celeb drops - Beeple, Pak, Fewocious. These leading drops were visually interesting, but most notoriety value came from crypto-adjacency. Pak an outright rug, Beeple polarizing, and Fewocious a mental mess. Despite crypto being the value driver and value premium for the platform, Nifty never tried to do anything crypto-related. All NFTs were minted on a centralized single contract that mixed together different pieces, different artists all in one messy blob. Images and descriptions and other metadata never came onchain (like cryptopunks), or even to decentralized storage (like ipfs or arweave). They just threw it in fickle cloud storage on low-quality web2 backends. Hundreds of millions of dollars of volume, and Nifty never bothered to write a single decentralized smart contract. Fast-forward five years. It’s a crypto winter, fake acquisitions of failing startups left and right. Nifty announces a full platform shutdown, effective one month later. “Withdraw your NFTs before it’s too late.” They’re planning to delete your wallets, wipe their storage, and ultimately delete whatever fake loose blockchain links ever existed from web2 NFTs to the real art. Nifty couldn’t be bothered to harden or decentralize the infra over many years, and now unwilling to even offer batch migration tooling for their fake crypto platform. Every art that ever touched Nifty will receive a steep valuation discount because of how poorly they stewarded the platform. Even competitors like OpenSea made huge advances like Seaport to decentralized crypto tech. For Nifty, it’s not even zero contribution - just a big fat minus sign. Goodbye and good riddance(foobar/)