Social NFT marketplace Rodeo has become the second NFT platform this week to announce its closure amid a tough market climate for nonfungible tokens.
Rodeo launched via Apple’s iOS store in March last year and was designed to be a social-media-focused NFT collecting platform, with an emphasis on creators getting rewarded for posting over purely buying and selling NFTs.
It utilized complex crypto and blockchain features to make it simple for mainstream users.
However, Rodeo CEO and co-founder Kayvon Tehranian said in an X post on Tuesday that the platform had struggled to scale enough to become sustainable.
“We believed collecting could be playful and communal — not just transactional. That belief guided every product decision we made,” he wrote, adding:
“Ultimately, Rodeo didn’t achieve its core objective. While the product resonated deeply with a committed community, it didn’t grow to the scale required for the platform to be sustainable long-term. Because of that, continuing to operate Rodeo is not possible.” Source: Kayvon Tehranian
Moving forward, Rodeo has outlined a plan for users to move their assets and data to other platforms. Firstly, users will be able to transfer media and metadata to the blockchain data storage platform Arweave.
Rodeo will also provide an asset migration assistant, guiding users on how to transfer assets from the platform’s smart contract.
Between Jan. 27 and Feb. 10, Rodeo will continue to function as usual, but from Feb. 10, the platform will switch to read-only mode. By March 10, Rodeo will be completely switched off.
This isn’t the only organizational shift Tehranian has made this week, revealing on Tuesday that ownership of the NFT artist platform and gallery Foundation is being transferred to digital art platform Blackdove.
Tehranian said the project started as an experiment to see whether artists could be fairly compensated for their work online, and that it has overseen $230 million in primary sales since launch.
The founder said the platform…
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