Despite Name Brand NFT Deals, Nifty's Shuts Down

By Ryan Ozawa

A social network turned Web3 creators portal that managed to work with some of the biggest names in entertainment announced that it was shutting down today.

Nifty's was backed by preeminent businessmen Mark Cuban and Joe Lubin in 2021 with a $10 million raise that included investors like Coinbase Ventures and Dapper Labs. Thanks to a deal with entertainment giant Warner Bros., Nifty's came out of the gate offering NFTs based on the 1996 film "Space Jam," featuring sports stars like LeBron James and various Looney Tunes characters, to promote a 2021 sequel.

The platform—which has no connection to the Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway marketplace—continued to release NFTs featuring immensely popular franchises, including "The Matrix" and "Game of Thrones"—the latter of which was soundly mocked for poor designs. But with its "limited resources in a difficult market," Nifty's "pivoted to developing a platform for Web3 creators," according to a company update posted to Twitter.

"Since then, we’ve been heads down building our new product and working on opportunities to access the capital required to keep building," the company explained. In May, the company announced that it was shutting down its website to make way for its new platform, which would use decentralized storage. Nifty's also moved many of its digital assets to the Polygon blockchain, which it noted would be compatible with popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.

That new platform, never came online, and the plan wasn't enough to attract additional backers.

"Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, the investment opportunities we were working on didn’t pan out, and we now find ourselves at the end of our runway."

The company saw strong sales of some of its projects, including "Shark Week," "Bullet Train," and "Build Your Realm," and as it announced its shut down, said it tried to ensure that they could continue independently.

"We decentralized all the NFT media and redistributed the NFTs on the Polygon blockchain, unless they were already on Ethereum," the company said, and pointed to Twitter accounts for the now separate projects like @matrix_avatars, @LooneyTunesNFT, and @BuildYourRealm.

For holders of NFTs from its Warner Bros. brands, Nifty's has developed instructions for them to export their private keys to preserve their collection.

"We are profoundly grateful to our partners, investors and community members for giving us the opportunity to be a part of the Web3 story," the company wrote. "We believe that story is about the world waking up to the power of digital ownership, and while we are deeply saddened to see Nifty’s part in it come to an end, we can’t wait to see where the Web3 community takes things next."

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