"Nifty Gateway, which described itself as a "curated platform" for digital art, once seemed to be on track to disrupt the art market. The site's goal, according to its co-founder Duncan Cock-Foster, was to convert one billion people into NFT owners. In October 2025, reported 2.14 million wallets trading NFTs, though that figure does not take into account individuals owning multiple wallets or wallets that belong to companies."
""[We reached out to] anyone who we thought could help advance the medium [of NFTs] and help move it forward," he said, mentioning a positive initial conversation with the artist Kenny Scharf as an example. "We thought that people with a lot of engagement on Instagram was a good criterion to use because at the time and still now, the collector base for NFTs tends to be younger and more digitally native than the collector base for physical art.""
Nifty Gateway, a curated NFT marketplace for digital art, aimed to convert one billion people into NFT owners but achieved only 0.2% of this goal with 2.14 million wallets by October 2025. The platform's curatorial approach, which prioritized artists with high Instagram engagement to appeal to younger, digitally native collectors, likely contributed to its eventual closure. Co-founder Duncan Cock-Foster left the company in 2023 and acknowledged insights about the NFT market before and after the bubble burst. The marketplace's strategy of selecting artists based on social media metrics rather than artistic innovation revealed fundamental misunderstandings about sustainable art market development and collector preferences.
#nft-marketplace-collapse #digital-art-curation #art-market-disruption #social-media-metrics #blockchain-art-economics
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
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