20 Sales a Day: Why Are Nifty Gateway’s Founders Leaving Gemini?

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Founders of Nifty Gate­way, the Gem­i­ni-owned NFT art mar­ket­place, have pub­licly announced their depar­ture from Gem­i­ni on Wednes­day as they pre­pare for their next venture.

Estab­lished by broth­ers Dun­can and Grif­fin Cock Fos­ter in 2018, Nifty Gate­way is designed specif­i­cal­ly for NFT art col­lec­tors. It was acquired by Gem­i­ni in 2019 and lat­er facil­i­tat­ed a $3.5 mil­lion sale of the “Every­days” col­lec­tion by artist Mike Winkel­mann — oth­er­wise known as Beeple.

Winkel­mann lat­er made head­lines again after secur­ing a whop­ping $69 mil­lion in an auc­tion at Christie’s, almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly start­ing the NFT buzz, which last­ed through­out 2021.

Nifty’s ini­tial dom­i­nance in the NFT space was quick­ly over­tak­en by the launch of NFT projects that focused more on avatar-like jpegs. The mar­ket began shift­ing towards NFT mar­ket­places such as OpenSea.

Read More: The Top 8 NFT Mar­ket­places – Where To Buy NFTs

In a con­ver­sa­tion with Block­works, Dun­can Cock Fos­ter said that start­ing a busi­ness inevitably involves mak­ing mistakes.

“There are cer­tain­ly many things I would do dif­fer­ent­ly if I had a chance to do it all over again,” Cock Fos­ter said. “How­ev­er, I am over­all extreme­ly proud of the work we have done.”

NFT trad­ing vol­umes have dipped sig­nif­i­cant­ly over the past year, although Jan­u­ary has seen a slight rebound — this week, Nifty Gate­way is see­ing less than 20 trades a day in sales on Ethereum. 

Par­ent com­pa­ny Gem­i­ni is also going through a tumul­tuous time as it bat­tles law­suits from  cus­tomers of its lend­ing plat­form, Gem­i­ni Earn, fol­low­ing the col­lapse of cryp­to lender Gen­e­sis, which filed for bank­rupt­cy last week. 

Despite appar­ent chal­lenges, Cock Fos­ter insists his deci­sion to leave Gem­i­ni in the near future was because he and his broth­er “are entre­pre­neurs at heart, and we want to get back to entrepreneur-ing.”

“There is no deny­ing that cryp­to and NFT mar­kets are going through a tumul­tuous time right now, and Gem­i­ni is no excep­tion. But bet­ting against the Win­klevoss twins is a ter­ri­ble idea,” he said. “They are in the top 0.01% of the world’s most deter­mined peo­ple, and I am con­fi­dent that Gem­i­ni will emerge from this cryp­to win­ter stronger than ever before.”

Although Cock Fos­ter is unsure what the next steps will be, he still remains opti­mistic about the Web3 space and will be keep­ing a close eye on the NFT mar­ket as he looks into his next venture.

“A nar­ra­tive that I hear from the main­stream tech indus­try is that cryp­to isn’t use­ful for any­thing. Being deep in the Web3 space, I know from first-hand expe­ri­ence that that isn’t true — every sin­gle day I encounter artists whose life has been changed by NFTs,” Cock Fos­ter said. 

“Being high­ly under­es­ti­mat­ed means that Web3 builders will have a chance to cre­ate great things while the rest of the world catch­es up to the val­ue of this technology.”


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