Recur, a platform for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has announced its decision to shut down operations less than two years after securing $50 million in funding from prominent figures such as Joe Lubin (co-founder of Ethereum), Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (founders of Gemini), and Gary Vaynerchuk. The company cited recent unfavorable market conditions as the reason behind this move.
As part of the shutdown process, Recur will be phasing out its core services, which include NFT withdrawals, stablecoin cash-outs, and collectible trading, over the next few months. Effective August 18, the platform has disabled its main transactional functionalities, such as primary and secondary sales of NFTs. Additionally, new user account creation has been disabled, and all other site functions will be completely shut down by November 16.
In order to ensure the retrievability of data, Recur is migrating the metadata and media for its NFTs to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized storage protocol. While the platform gradually phases out its services, users will still be able to withdraw their NFTs to on-chain wallets and cash out any redeemable balance until November 16.
The decision to shut down comes after Recur’s announcement two years ago that it was valued at $333 million following a $50 million series A funding round led by DIGITAL, a metaverse investment platform. However, the NFT market has experienced a downturn this year, with significant declines in sales volumes and prices of digital collectibles. According to CoinGecko, an on-chain data aggregator, NFT sales volume dropped from $4.84 billion in Q1 2023 to $3.15 billion in Q2 2023, marking a 35% decline quarter on quarter.
Tags: NFTs
