Despite raising $50 million in 2021, NFT startup Recur shuts down.
Recur, a non-fungible token (NFT) platform, has announced its decision to shut down operations. This comes less than two years after the company raised $50 million in funding from prominent figures such as Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, founders of Gemini. Recur cited recent unfavorable market conditions as the reason for its closure.
As part of the shutdown process, Recur will be phasing out its core services over the next few months. This includes NFT withdrawals, stablecoin cash-outs, and collectible trading. Starting from August 18, the platform has disabled main transactional functionalities like primary and secondary sales of NFTs. New user account creation has also been disabled, and all other site functions will be completely shut down by November 16.
In addition, Recur is migrating the metadata and media for its NFTs to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a decentralized storage protocol. While the platform gradually winds down, users will still be able to withdraw their NFTs to on-chain wallets and cash out any redeemable balance until November 16.
This decision to shut down comes amid a slump in the NFT market. Despite being valued at $333 million after its series A funding round in 2023, Recur has seen a decline in sales volumes and prices of digital collectibles. On-chain data aggregator CoinGecko reports that NFT sales volume dropped from $4.84 billion in Q1 2023 to $3.15 billion in Q2 2023, representing a 35% decline quarter on quarter.
