Rodeo and the NFT Market Crisis: When Innovation Is Not Enough

Rodeo’s closure marks another negative milestone in the history of the non-fungible token market. This NFT social platform, which was launched with great optimism on Apple’s iOS store just over a year ago, has confirmed that it will cease operations, becoming the second major marketplace to withdraw this week due to the sustained downturn in the sector.

Rodeo’s Vision That Failed to Scale

Rodeo was born with a different proposition: to create a space where creators could be rewarded for sharing content, not just for buying and selling NFTs. Its CEO and co-founder, Kayvon Tehranian, explained on social media that the platform aimed to make collecting something playful and community-oriented, beyond purely transactional.

“We believed that collecting could be playful and community-driven, not just transactional. That belief guided every product decision we made,” Tehranian stated in his announcement. However, this innovative vision was not enough to overcome the challenges of the current market. Rodeo failed to reach the scale necessary to ensure its long-term sustainability, forcing the founders to make the difficult decision to shut down operations.

Migration Plan: How Rodeo Protects User Assets

In response to this situation, Rodeo has designed a plan to facilitate the transition for its users. NFT owners will be able to transfer their media and metadata via Arweave, the blockchain-based decentralized storage platform. The company will also provide an automated assistant to guide users through the process of migrating their assets from Rodeo’s smart contracts.

The timeline is clear: the platform will operate normally until February 10, after which it will switch to read-only mode, allowing users to view but not perform transactions. Finally, March 10 will mark the complete shutdown of all operations. During this period, Rodeo expects that most users will have completed transferring their digital collections.

Alongside this shutdown, Tehranian announced that Foundation, its digital art platform and NFT gallery that has overseen over $230 million in primary sales since its inception, will be transferred to Blackdove, another digital art platform that will assume its future operations.

The NFT Market in Free Fall: Rodeo is Not the Only One

Rodeo’s closure is not an isolated event but a symptom of a larger disease. The NFT market has experienced an unprecedented decline since the 2022 crash. To illustrate the magnitude of the fall, the data is compelling: in January 2022, the Ethereum network processed nearly $5 billion in NFT trading volume. Just four years later, in January 2026, that volume had collapsed to only $159.2 million, representing a 96% reduction.

This downward trend has triggered a wave of closures in the sector. Nifty Gateway, another flagship marketplace from the initial NFT wave in 2021, has also announced its closure. The platform has updated its asset withdrawal strategy, also using Arweave for transfers and extending its deadline to April 23 to give users with multiple collections more time. It has even developed a mass withdrawal tool specialized for this type of operation.

The current landscape suggests that the NFT industry faces not just a temporary bear cycle, but a fundamental rethinking of its value proposition. The combination of reduced demand, stricter regulations, and increasing competition has made the business models that thrived during the speculative boom of 2021 and early 2022 unsustainable.