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By this point, it’s pretty clear the NFTs that were positioned as The Next Big Thing a few years ago did not end up living up to that prophecy. With that said, there are still plenty of people holding out hope—including the owners of some digital art that temporarily disappeared after the company behind it tried to save some money by switching to a cheaper hosting plan.
The blockchain technology that serves as the foundation for “non-fungible tokens” has been around since Bitcoin was unleashed on an unsuspecting world more than 15 years ago, and while NFTs existed in various forms in the 2010s, they really Had A Moment once the following decade rolled around.
“NFT” can be used to describe a wide variety of online assets that harness them as a way to document and facilitate proof of ownership, but they’ve become synonymous with digital art and monetized memes that left plenty of people confused when they started changing hands for some absolutely absurd prices in 2021.
There were plenty of NFT evangelists as well as slews of skeptics and critics who couldn’t understand why anyone would shell out a significant amount of cash to “own” JPEGs that anyone capable of taking a screenshot could add to their hard drive, and in 2023, a study came out that suggested 95% of the ones that had been minted were functionally worthless.
However, there are still plenty of people clinging to the NFTs in their possession in the hope they might be able to cash in at some point in the future, and according to 404, some of them got a bit of a scare last week when images linked to a project that was formerly backed by Nike suddenly vanished.
Nike was one of the many brands that tried to take advantage of the NFT hype when it purchased a company called RTFKT in 2021 before collaborating with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami to create more than 19,000 digital pieces that comprised what was dubbed the “Clone X” collection.
The cheapest of those NFTs cost around $60,000 in 2022, and some of them ended up changing hands for more than $1 million. However, Nike decided to stop supporting the project in 2024 and tasked former RTFKT CTO Samuel Cardillo with overseeing the migration of the existing assets to a new host in order to cut costs.
That pivot led to a bit of an incident last Friday when CloudFlare, the service that connected users to the DigitalOcean platform where the NFTs could be bought and sold, started denying access to the assets after the paid plan that was being used to support the project was downgraded to a free one.
Imagine spending $1.25M on a rare NFT…
Come back 3 years later…
And the image is just gone😭 pic.twitter.com/2NmbtJUoZr
— Pix🔎 (@PixOnChain) April 24, 2025
Cardillo told the outlet there was simply a misunderstanding that led to the free plan being instituted earlier than anticipated in the midst of a migration to AWS servers, and access was eventually restored.
It was a fairly serendipitous setback when you consider it occurred on the same day Nike was hit with a federal lawsuit for withdrawing its support of the Clone X project from some jilted NFT owners seeking $5 million in damages.
Content shared from brobible.com.