The digital art community was shocked early this morning after the prominent Ethereum-based $NFT platform Foundation stopped its activities.
This was due to the reversal of the recent acquisition by Blackdove, a digital art gallery company.
Withdraw
Blackdove CEO Marc Billings announced the difficult decision to “pause our continued support of the Foundation platform” and return management to the Foundation’s original founder, Kayvon Tehranian, for an orderly transition.
According to Billings, Blackdove initially planned to acquire Foundation to integrate asset tokenization into its existing software infrastructure. This would allow customers to view, purchase and display digital art.
However, the full due diligence was only completed after the operational handover as the nature of the deal was quite fast-paced. During this phase, Blackdove ultimately concluded that building its own marketplace was the most viable path forward.
Billings emphasized that the decision has “no correlation to demand for digital art,” noting that Blackdove’s physical digital art installations are up 40% year-on-year.
The downfall of the $NFT industry
About 96% of everything $NFT collections are now considered ‘dead’, characterized by zero commercial activity or meaningful community involvement.
The total market cap for NFTs suffered a massive 72% collapse by 2025.
It is worth noting that poor taking of money from investors and abandonment of projects has seriously eroded the public.