To casual observers of the NFT 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.
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.” But they do not represent the totality of crypto-based art.
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