Social NFT marketplace Rodeo has announced it will cease operations in early March 2026, becoming the second major NFT platform this week to shutter amid a prolonged market downturn. The platform, which launched on Apple's iOS store in March 2025, was designed to focus on social collecting and rewarding creators for posting, rather than purely transactional buying and selling.
In a post on X, Rodeo CEO and co-founder Kayvon Tehranian stated the platform failed to achieve the scale necessary for long-term sustainability. "Ultimately, Rodeo didn't achieve its core objective. While the product resonated deeply with a committed community, it didn't grow to the scale required for the platform to be sustainable long-term," Tehranian wrote. He added that the belief that collecting could be "playful and communal — not just transactional" guided every product decision.
The company has outlined a phased shutdown and migration plan for its users. Between January 27 and February 10, the platform will function normally. On February 10, it will switch to read-only mode, and by March 10, it will be completely shut down. To assist users, Rodeo will provide tools to transfer media and metadata to the decentralized storage platform Arweave and offer an asset migration assistant for moving assets from its smart contracts.
This closure is part of a broader pattern of distress in the NFT sector. Earlier in the week, prominent marketplace Nifty Gateway also updated its wind-down plans, extending its asset migration deadline to April 23 and similarly planning to use Arweave for data transfers. The NFT market has been in a severe slump since the 2022 crash. Data from CryptoSlam illustrates the dramatic decline: at the market peak around January 2022, Ethereum saw nearly $5 billion in NFT trading volume, compared to just $159.2 million in January 2026.
In related news, Tehranian also revealed that ownership of the NFT artist platform Foundation is being transferred to digital art platform Blackdove. He noted that Foundation, which started as an experiment in fair artist compensation, has overseen $230 million in primary sales since launch and will continue operating under new leadership.
