Reality Hits for "Art" Collectors as Million-Dollar Nike NFTs Vanish From Internet

Going Dork

Remember when the guys who spent millions of dollars on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) would get mad at detractors for saying they shelled out for glorified JPGs? Turns out those critics may have been onto something.

As 404 Media reports, tens of thousands of NFTs from a collection known as CloneX RTFKT — a collaboration between Nike's "digital sneakers" venture and Japanese visual artist Takashi Murakami — started to disappear because the team behind the effort didn't shell out to keep the expensive digital images hosted.

According to the crypto site Blockworks, Nike's RTFKT — pronounced, goofily, as "artifact" — NFTs sold for $60,000 a pop minimum just a few years ago, and would sometimes climb into the millions for rarer versions from the CloneX collab.

Earlier this month, more than 19,000 NFTs from that collaborative collection went up in smoke. In their stead, black boxes appeared with white text advising viewers that Cloudflare, the web services provider, had taken them down.

Sunrise, Sunset

Though the Cloudflare issue was later taken care of thanks to Samuel Cardillo, RTFKT's onetime chief technology officer who Nike kept on after deciding to "sunset" its NFT venture at the beginning of this year, the entire debacle has been a masterclass in crypto-era outrageousness.

"The reason we're moving to the free plan is that, RTFKT is sunset, there are no plans to do any drops or anything like that," Cardillo told 404, "so having a paid plan with Cloudflare makes absolutely no sense anymore."

Coincidentally, Nike's unilateral move to shut down RTFKT also became the subject of a Brooklyn-based lawsuit right around the time its NFTs went dark — though the two instances don't appear to be directly related.

As Reuters reports, plaintiffs in the new suit allege that the shoe makers stalled demand for the expensive digital images when choosing to close it. Led by Australian national Jagdeep Cheema, the irked NFT buyers claim that Nike misled them by not telling them that the project would one day be shut down, and if they'd known, those self-styled investors would never have bought the NFTs in the first place.

Oh, the irony.

More on crypto: Trump Tells Justice Department to Just Let Crypto Fraud Slide

The post Reality Hits for "Art" Collectors as Million-Dollar Nike NFTs Vanish From Internet appeared first on Futurism.