A social network turned Web3 developer portal that managed to partner with some of the biggest names in the entertainment world announced it would close today.
Nifty’s was backed in 2021 by leading businessmen Mark Cuban and Joe Lubin with a $10 million raise, including investors such as Coinbase Ventures and Dapper Labs. Thanks to a deal with entertainment giant Warner Bros. Nifty’s came out of the gate with NFTs based on the 1996 movie “Space Jam,” starring sports stars like LeBron James and several Looney Tunes characters, to promote a 2021 sequel.
The platform — which has no connection to the Nifty Gateway marketplace, which is owned by Gemini — continued to release NFTs featuring hugely popular franchises, including “The Matrix” and “Game of Thrones,” the latter of which was pretty much derided for poor design. But with hislimited resources in a tough market, Nifty’s “turned to develop a platform for Web3 creators,” according to a company update on Twitter.
“Since then, we have been busy building our new product and working on opportunities to access the capital needed to continue building,” the company explained. In May, the company announced that it would closing 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 was noted to be compatible with popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
That new platform never came online and the plan wasn’t enough to attract additional lenders.
“Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, the investment opportunities we were working on did not pan out and we are now at the end of our catwalk.”
The company saw strong sales from some of its projects, including “Shark Week,” “Bullet Train,” and “Build Your Realm,” and when it announced the closure, it said it was trying to ensure they could continue independently.
“We decentralized all NFT media and redistributed the NFTs on the Polygon blockchain unless they were already on Ethereum,” the company said, pointing to Twitter accounts for the now separate projects such as @matrix_avatars, @LooneyTunesNFT and @BuildYourRealm.
For holders of NFTs of its Warner Bros. brands, Nifty’s has developed instructions to export their private keys to preserve their collection.
“We are deeply 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 the story is about the world waking up to the power of digital ownership, and while we’re deeply saddened to see Nifty’s role in it come to an end, we can’t wait to see where the Web3 community goes. doing it now.”
