Rodeo, a social-focused NFT marketplace, announced it will stop operating in early March after failing to grow enough to stay viable. The decision was shared by the team and its CEO on social channels, and users were given a short window to move their work off the site. Reports say the platform will be taken offline in stages over the next few weeks. Shutdown Timetable And What It Means For Users Between January 27 and February 10, Rodeo will remain fully functional. On February 10 the site will switch to read-only mode and, by March 10, it will be shut off completely. That schedule gives creators and collectors a limited period to access their accounts, download files, and prepare transfers before trading and posting are disabled. According to company posts, Rodeo will provide tools to help move media and metadata to other storage systems. Migration Tools Reports note that Rodeo plans to let users migrate media and metadata to Arweave, a decentralized storage option, and that an asset migration assistant will be offered to guide transfers from Rodeo’s smart contracts. Those steps aim to prevent loss of on-chain references and to preserve creators’ work in a more permanent form. While migration tools ease the process, collectors should act quickly because on-chain operations still require steps outside the Rodeo interface. Why It Happened And The Team’s Take According to posts from CEO Kayvon Tehranian, the product won a loyal following but did not scale to the level needed for long-term survival. The team framed Rodeo as an experiment in social collecting — rewarding creators for posting and building community rather than just for trading — but said that a small, passionate user base was not enough to fund ongoing operations. Some leadership changes were also announced alongside the shutdown news. A Broader Pattern In The NFT Market The closure of Rodeo follows other recent platform wind-downs, most notably well-known marketplace Nifty Gateway that announced its own withdrawal and shutdown timetable this month. The twin moves have shaken artists and collectors, who now face multiple deadlines and the task of moving assets off platforms that previously handled much of the heavy lifting. This wave of closures is being treated as another sign that many NFT businesses are still struggling to find consistent demand. Transfer Help And Practical Steps For Creators Reports say Rodeo will publish guides and an assistant to help users transfer NFTs and related files. Creators should export any off-chain media and save contract addresses, token IDs, and metadata hashes. If an NFT’s media is moved to Arweave, the token can keep its on-chain pointer while the underlying file stays retrievable for the future.
