Add one more casualty of the collapsed NFT market to the list: Foundation, a curated Ethereum-based marketplace that rose to prominence during the 2021 digital art boom. On Wednesday, cofounder and CEO Kayvon Tehranian announced in an open letter on X that the platform’s sale to digital art company Blackdove collapsed, leaving no viable way to keep operating.
“Our goal in pursuing a sale was always to see Foundation live on—to find someone who would keep the platform running and serve this community going forward,” Tehranian wrote. “That’s no longer possible.”
Foundation has now started a “wind-down process,” which will see the infrastructure underpinning the NFTs and digital assets backed by the platform kept active for a “one-year window.” Tehranian urged users to start the process of migrating off the platform.
“I acknowledge this is a disappointing outcome, but I continue to believe this community is resilient and better days are ahead,” he said, acknowledging that the “current state of the market” meant that there are no other viable buyers “worth pursuing.”
Founded in February 2021 by Tehranian and Matthew Vernon, Foundation distinguished itself from free-for-all marketplaces like OpenSea through an invite-only model aimed at digital artists and serious collectors. While it never reached the name-brand recognition of SuperRare, another curated maretplace, Business Insider cited it one month after launch as one of a handful of NFT startups to watch. At the time, Tehranian pitched the platform as a way to forge a more direct connecftion between digital artists and their audiences.
“We have all of these incredible artworks that have always lived on the internet and that we’ve given millions of likes to,” he told the Clubhouse show The Good Times Show that same month. “But there is now an opportunity for a fan—a true, true, true fan—to come in there and actually own that artwork.”
Foundation hosted a number of notable auctions of the period, including Chris Torres’s Nyan Cat, which sold for the then-equivalent of about $600,000, and Edward Snowden’s Stay Free, produced with the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which fetched 2,224 ETH. In a letter announcing the sale to Blackdove in January, Tehranian said Foundation had facilitated $230 million in sales since launch.
In that same January letter, Tehranian said that the sale to Blackdove, a company that specializes in digital art displays and software, was an effort at securing “long-term stewardship” for the platform. At the same time, Tehranian announced that he was shutting down Rodeo, a social NFT app his team launched in 2024, saying that “it did not reach the size needed for long-term survival.”
Blackdove said on Wednesday, in a post from the Foundation’s X profile, that it had decided to “pause” its acquistion and return managment to Tehranian. “Due to the fast-moving nature of the acquisition, full due diligence was only able to be completed post-operational handover,” the post reads. “During this phase, it became evident that building our own marketplace is the path that makes the most sense for where we are taking the company.”
The closure caps a brutal stretch for NFT platforms. In January, Nifty Gateway, a marketplace acquired by leading crypto-exchange Gemini in 2019, announced it would cease operations. During the NFT boom in 2021, the platform reported $300 million in sales, boosted by a Sotheby’s partnership for a $17 million NFT drop by the artist Pak.
NFT sales have dropped by as much as 70 percent since the 2021 boom, according to crypto news site CCN. The value of major NFT series like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and others, have also collapsed. Christie’s shuttered its digital art department last fall, and Sotheby’s drastically reduced its Metaverse team in 2024.
Tehranian, for his part, framed the Foundation news as further evidence of the importance of the NFT–crypto community’s underlying mission of decentralization.
“This is exactly the kind of moment that validates Foundation’s commitment to decentralization,” Tehranian wrote.
