Conducting a post-mortem on an NFT (non-fungible token) marketplace is a tricky thing. Tim Schneider recently wrote about some of the economic reverberations of the post-bubble marketplace for blockchain-backed art, but I have always been more interested in the cultural and structural flaws that caused NFTs to draw so much ire from the art world.
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, Dappradar 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. At best, Nifty Gateway was around 0.2% of the way to its goal when it announced its closure. Like most NFT marketplaces, the site traded in more than digital art, but digital art sales were the driving force behind its initial success, and its curatorial approach likely accelerated its downfall.
I first interviewed Cock-Foster in 2022, when the NFT bubble had not yet burst; we spoke again this month. He left Nifty Gateway and its parent company Gemini in 2023, and while he preferred not to speculate about the causes of the site’s closure, he has insights about the NFT market—before and after the bubble.
In 2022, I asked Cock-Foster how he and the rest of the Nifty Gateway team decided which artists to approach about making NFTs for the platform.
“[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. We looked at artists who were really talented in the digital medium, who were creating stuff that really was unique and stood out to us, like Filip Hodas and FVCKRENDER.”
Scharf’s work seemed a fitting choice for an online marketplace that tended to favour a pop-centric aesthetic. Moving from Scharf to Hodas is an understandable progression, at least aesthetically. That Hodas’s works are also intensely reminiscent of Beeple’s underlines another issue this nascent field of what we might call “social-media art” has to contend with: if “likes” dictate visibility and commercial eligibility, trends will dictate success and artists will be incentivised to mimic each other’s work. The more conceptually facile, eye-grabbing and digestible the work becomes, the more people engage.
Reflecting on Nifty Gateway’s curatorial process now, Cock-Foster says Instagram popularity was one of several factors taken into account. “Looking at how people engage with an artwork is very important” he says. “Instagram engagement was one factor among many… creativity, authenticity, how well they engaged with the medium” had been of equal importance to the selection process.
Revenue stream for unseen creators
According to Cock-Foster in 2022, an overlooked group of visual creators who had found a niche on social media also stood to benefit from NFTs. “Especially in the early days, the people who benefited from NFTs the most were incredibly talented digital creators who essentially didn’t have a place to sell their work,” he said. “And the only way that they could make money was, they would be hired as animators to create 3D ads.”
This facet of NFT technology—that it has allowed people who were effectively viewed by art-world gatekeepers as artisans rather than fine artists to make money from their art—is often glossed over. In a post-DeviantArt, post-Tumblr online landscape, Instagram was for many the only viable path to visibility and, until recently, monetising that visibility was nearly impossible. So in terms of leveling the playing field for extremely technically talented people to make sales, yes, the blockchain was a godsend. But it is crucial to acknowledge that not everyone who is technically skilled is necessarily a fine artist.
Allowing 3D artists to become collectible was certainly noble, but their inclusion in this already precarious, speculative landscape made it difficult for the traditional art world to gauge its cultural heft. Nifty Gateway blurred the lines by insisting that the works of 3D artists and those of fine artists are not just of equal commercial value but of equal cultural significance. Time, more than any other filter, determines the latter, but NFT culture prizes immediacy and most NFT marketplaces have prioritised fast trades and urgent “drops” that inflate price points within a span of weeks or months, rather than years, which ultimately contributed to the bubble bursting. Cock-Foster now sees the unravelling of this speculative trading cycle as a positive development.
“It’s actually surprisingly common for new artistic mediums to [go through a bubble]. A lot of the people who ended up buying NFTs were doing it because they thought they could resell them for a higher price, which could become a self-reinforcing dynamic pretty quickly,” he says. “The nice part about a market crash is, financial motivations leave, and the people who are still around [are] people who really view NFTs as true works of art” He adds: “In five to ten years, [the NFT market] will look much healthier than it does now.”
Overlooked history
Installation view of Harold Cohen: AARON, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2024. From left to right: AARON Gijon, 2007; Coming to a Lighter Place, 1988; Untitled, Bathers Series, 1986. Photograph by Ron Amstutz. Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art
One of the virtues of the NFT market, Cock-Foster said in 2022, is that it provided a commercial venue for digital artists whom he claimed had been systematically shunned by traditional galleries. “Galleries at the time didn’t really accept digital artists, and so the digital artists who were popular didn’t really have a great way to earn a living from their skill,” he said. “That really made up the core group of people who became successful NFT artists in the early days.”
While it is true that blue-chip galleries did not feature digital art often, it is not true that galleries did not accept digital artists. Nevertheless, during the heyday of NFTs this underdog mythos galvanised online audiences into supporting digital creators, framing the traditional art ecosystem as one that only values analog practices. Artists who made digital works—among them Andy Warhol, Jenny Holzer, Albert Oehlen, Harold Cohen and Vera Molnár—were conveniently left out of this narrative.
It is true that, in the post NFT-era, digital artists have become more well-known; whether this would have been possible without the blockchain, we will never know. But to frame the entire art world as one homogenous and luddite structure is far too reductive—and inaccurate. Still, Cock-Foster was steadfast in his belief that a lack of understanding, rather than an application of traditional art world filters and standards, was the source of this divide.
“A lot of people who run [traditional galleries] are not internet native or were born in a different generation where digital art just wasn’t common,” he said. “Digital art appeals to people who grew up online, grew up using computers every day. If you didn’t grow up in that era, it could be really hard to understand digital art, and it creates real blind spots. It has gotten better, [but] those blind spots definitely still exist.”
Nifty Gateway had plenty of its own blind spots. One of the biggest was that the platform embraced myth-making over art history. It attempted to build something that lasts around digitally native artists whose primary skill is a mastery of the attention economy, filtered by the distribution mechanism of social media—which favours surface-level content—and curated by people whose understanding of the legacy of digital art was frustratingly incomplete.