Rodeo NFT Marketplace Shuts Down Amid Challenging Market Conditions

Rodeo, a social NFT marketplace, has announced its closure, becoming the second NFT platform to do so this week due to the challenging market environment for nonfungible tokens. According to Cointelegraph, Rodeo was launched on Apple's iOS store in March last year, aiming to create a social-media-focused NFT collecting platform that emphasized rewarding creators for posting rather than just buying and selling NFTs. The platform incorporated complex crypto and blockchain features to simplify the user experience for mainstream audiences. Rodeo's CEO and co-founder, Kayvon Tehranian, revealed in a post on X that the platform struggled to scale sufficiently to ensure sustainability. "We believed collecting could be playful and communal—not just transactional. That belief guided every product decision we made," Tehranian stated. However, he acknowledged that Rodeo did not achieve its core objective, as it failed to grow to the necessary scale for long-term sustainability. Consequently, continuing operations is not feasible. To assist users in transitioning, Rodeo has outlined a plan for asset and data migration to other platforms. Users will be able to transfer media and metadata to the blockchain data storage platform Arweave. Additionally, Rodeo will offer an asset migration assistant to guide users in transferring assets from the platform's smart contract. The platform will operate normally until February 10, after which it will switch to read-only mode, and by March 10, it will be completely shut down. In a related development, Tehranian announced that ownership of the NFT artist platform and gallery Foundation is being transferred to the digital art platform Blackdove. He noted that the project began as an experiment to ensure fair compensation for artists online, overseeing $230 million in primary sales since its inception. The platform will continue under new leadership committed to its long-term future. The NFT market has been in decline since the major crash in 2022, with only brief price spikes and no sustained recovery. At its peak in January 2022, Ethereum hosted nearly $5 billion in NFT trading volume, but by January 2026, this had dropped to just $159.2 million, according to CryptoSlam data. Meanwhile, Nifty Gateway, a prominent marketplace from the early NFT boom in 2021, has updated its winding-down process following community feedback. In a post on X, Nifty Gateway announced it will use Arweave for media and metadata transfers and extended its asset transfer deadline to April 23. The platform is also developing a bulk withdrawal tool for users with multiple NFTs, ensuring ample time for use before the deadline. Initially, Nifty Gateway announced its closure plans without specifying the reasons.