NFT Platform Recur to Shut Down Despite $50M Raise and Big Name Backers
NFT Platform Recur to Shut Down Despite $50M Raise and Big Name Backers
Gary Vaynerchuk and Nickelodeon characters like Tommy Pickles from “Rugrats” weren’t enough to keep the business afloat.
Another one bites the dust.
The NFT startup Recur said on Friday that its Web3 platform is winding down—unable to weather the chills of crypto winter despite hosting the IP of several big brands like Hello Kitty and Nickelodeon.
Over the next several months, Recur’s platform will steadily lose its core features, the firm said in a blog post. That includes the ability for users to withdraw NFTs from Recur, cash out stablecoin balances, and trade collectibles on Recur-hosted marketplaces.
“This decision has not been an easy one,” the company said on Twitter, citing “unforeseen challenges and shifts in the business landscape.”
Recur’s announcement captures recent headwinds in the NFT space as companies navigate a downturn in the popularity of digital collectibles. Last July, Recur embarked on a “jet-setting NFT experience” with Hello Kitty and Friends, only for its ambitions to be grounded a little more than a year later.
That same July, Recur noted there was “unprecedented demand” for its TV Packs that contained profile-picture (PFP) NFTs of Nickelodeon characters like Tommy Pickles from “Rugrats.” Pack openings will be disabled in November, Recur said on Friday.
Founded in 2021, Recur billed itself as a company that offers other businesses Web3 “building blocks.” Its platform could be used for creating in-game assets, loyalty programs, and digital collectibles that leverage NFTs, according to its website.
Recur’s move comes not long after Nifty’s, a social network turned Web3 creators portal, also said it was shutting down. Nifty’s had secured big-name media titles as partners too, such as “The Matrix” and “Game of Thrones.”
With over 380,000 NFTs minted through Recur, the firm said it has changes in store to ensure that various digital collectibles will live on.
Recur said metadata and media for its NFTs will be migrated to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer file-sharing network built by Protocol Labs. Other assets will be hosted on Filecoin’s network, Recur added.
In December 2021, Recur offered a Recur Pass during a limited, 24-hour sales window. Sold as an NFT for $300, the pass could be resold and offered holders early access to future NFT drops among other benefits.
Last February, a Recur Pass sold for $88,888, Recur said in a statement on Twitter. Today, the cheapest Recur Pass listed on OpenSea currently asks for 0.001 ETH (about $1.69).
In late 2021, Recur said it was valued at $333 million after it announced a $50 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Digital, an investment fund backed by the family office of New York Mets majority owner and billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen.
Other notable names had participated in a $5 million seed funding round earlier that year, such as investor and NFT creator Gary Vaynerchuk, Gemini’s Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, and Ethereum co-founder and ConsenSys founder Joe Lubin. (Disclosure: ConsenSys funds an editorially-independent Decrypt.)
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Can you imagine, how much money went into all this and where it all ended up? It couldn't have gone up in flames, it had to end with some people. I don't think NFT's as-is have a future, but I think that NFT's will eventually end up in the hands of the masses in a format that isn't focussed on profit but more as a means to share, create and own art for digital games etc.
There are countless other examples where some new service gets a lot of funding and eventually dies. Most probably really was spent out without being pocketed, fancy office was rented, state of the art tech used, huge sallaries and ridiculous benefits etc.
I cannot imagine NFTs or crypto in general being widely used. Tech is inefficient and not solving anything better than what we already have been using for years. If someone wants to sell digital art there already are ways like DeviantArt, Patreon etc.
True, I've been using DeviantArt and Patreon myself. But when it comes to gaming, there is something in people and wanting to collect. I think that where NFTs might make a difference is in gaming (assuming games won't be the profit-focussed, web3 "X to earn" kind of game and actually focus on storytelling, gameplay and land well with the masses).
For example, Fortnite uses all kinds of psychological tactics to get people to buy more stuff, folding ideas explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
I don't play the game myself, but I feel that this is where NFT might make a better alternative. You keep that ability to make things collectable without all the nasty bussines tactics (IF implemented that way, ofcourse).
But you could already do all that without NFTs. And if we are talking about transferring items across games which was a popular talking point in the past, I still cannot imagine how it would work and why would any dev implement this. Imagine Fortnite gun later used in Call of Duty.
Yeah moving items across games would be impossible at the moment. But I feel that with nft's, you at least get to own the item. That, and people get to make their own. It's not easy to add your own skin to Fortnite, for example.
I don't want to sound like I'm for NFT's, but I think if done right, it has a usecase.
if done right
Who's going to do it? For a myriad of reasons, including "why would we?" it won't be the game developers. How would it be done without support from the developers?
Also, this already exists in a sense in the Steam Workshop.