Specialized NFT Marketplaces Beat Exchanges
Duncan Cock Foster, co-founder of Nifty Gateway, on NFTs as luxury goods
The core mistake was treating NFTs like another trading pair, when the winning NFT products behaved more like curated retail and auction experiences than exchange order books. Exchange users arrive to buy liquid assets fast, compare prices, and move on. NFT buyers browse artists, follow drops, care about presentation, and often buy for taste, identity, or collecting status. Gemini got further by keeping Nifty Gateway separate and merchandising NFTs as art, not just another crypto tab.
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Nifty Gateway worked because Gemini bought it in 2019 as a standalone product with its own site and brand. That separation let it support artist drops, credit card checkout, and more editorial presentation, which fits collecting behavior better than an exchange screen built for BTC and ETH trading.
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The market evidence backed the point. Coinbase launched Coinbase NFT in 2022, then began sunsetting the standalone marketplace on July 10, 2024. Kraken put its NFT marketplace into withdrawal only mode on November 27, 2024, with full shutdown by February 27, 2025.
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Specialized marketplaces also solved a discovery problem. Art Blocks grew by curating artists and giving collectors a reason to show up for specific drops, while broad venues like OpenSea had to index every NFT use case at once. In practice, curation helped art break through noise, while general marketplaces optimized more for volume and breadth.
The next phase pushes even harder toward specialization. If NFTs keep behaving more like luxury goods and digital art than speculative instruments, the durable winners will look less like exchanges and more like branded galleries, with separate environments, stronger curation, and higher effort around each release.