Why RTFKT and Nike’s Ethereum NFT Artwork Disappeared

The images associated with multiple Ethereum NFT collections from the Nike-acquired RTFKT—which was shuttered late last year—stopped displaying early Thursday due to an alleged issue with cloud hosting service Cloudflare.The company’s flagship Clone X profile picture collection—created in collaboration with noted artist Takashi Murakami—and its Animus collections stopped showing their respective, colorful imagery, and instead all showed the same black background and white text as a result of its images being stored off-chain.“This content has been restricted,” the replaced images read. “Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service.” As NFT collectors on X (formerly Twitter) “Somehow this morning Cloudflare decided to move to the Free plan a few days before the end of the contract,” According to Cardillo, infrastructure changes had been discussed as early as December when RTFKT was sunset, but delays kept a formal decision from being made until earlier this month.The When data is not stored on-chain, projects are reliant on third-parties to continue hosting and displaying the data, or else the non-fungibility or uniqueness of those tokens can be rendered moot.For example, an $11 million NFT music album hosted by a While images for RTFKT’s collections “I am working closely with [the] AR Drive team to decentralize both CloneX and Animus to ensure that post-April 30, no downtime of your favorite art [will] ever happen again,” he said.AR Drive is an open-source app that utilizes Arweave’s popular decentralized storage network, allowing users to pay once to permanently store their files on-chain.Cardillo told RTFKT was Representatives for Nike and Cloudflare did not immediately respond to Edited by Andrew Hayward