Social NFT Marketplace Rodeo Joins Wave of Platform Closures

Despite building a creator-focused, social NFT experience, Rodeo said limited growth made long-term operation unviable. The platform will support asset and data migration to Arweave before going read-only on Feb. 10 and shutting down entirely on March 10. The move comes as NFT trading activity is still very far below the 2022 peaks.

Rodeo to Shut Down

Social NFT marketplace Rodeo announced it will shut down after failing to reach the scale needed to stay sustainable. This makes it the second NFT platform this week to confirm its closure thanks to the prolonged weakness in the nonfungible token market. 

Rodeo was lLaunched on Apple’s iOS store in March last year, and positioned itself as a social-media-driven NFT collecting app that prioritized rewarding creators for participation and engagement rather than focusing purely on buying and selling digital assets. Despite simplifying complex blockchain mechanics for mainstream users, the platform struggled to achieve enough growth.

X post from Kayvon Tehranian

In a post on X, Rodeo CEO and co-founder Kayvon Tehranian said the product resonated with a dedicated community but ultimately did not meet its core objective of becoming a viable long-term platform. He added that the decision to shut down was unavoidable given the lack of sustainable scale. 

As part of its wind-down plan, Rodeo will allow users to migrate their media and metadata to blockchain data storage platform Arweave and will provide an asset migration assistant to help users transfer NFTs from the platform’s smart contract. Rodeo will continue operating normally until Feb. 10, after which it will switch to read-only mode, before shutting down entirely on March 10.

The closure follows an organizational change from Tehranian, who also announced this week that ownership of the NFT artist platform and gallery Foundation is being transferred to digital art company Blackdove. Tehranian said Foundation began as an experiment to explore whether artists could be fairly compensated online and has facilitated around $230 million in primary sales since launch. He explained that the platform will continue operating under new leadership focused on its long-term future.

Rodeo’s shutdown now forms part of the overall downturn in NFTs, which have struggled to recover since the market crash in 2022. At the height of the boom in early 2022, Ethereum accounted for close to $5 billion in monthly NFT trading volume, according to CryptoSlam data. By January 2026, that figure fell sharply to just $159.2 million.

Ethereum monthly NFT sales volume (Source: CryptoSlam)

Meanwhile, major NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway has also updated its wind-down plans after community feedback. In a separate post on X, the platform said it will similarly rely on Arweave to help users transfer media and metadata and has extended its asset migration deadline to a 90-day window from Feb. 23 to April 23.