Nifty Gateway

Nifty Gateway was founded in 2018 by twin brothers Duncan Cock Foster and Griffin Cock Foster. Duncan Cock-Foster later recalled that the support and counsel provided by Adam Draper, Brayton Williams, and Maddie Callander of Boost VC allowed the twins, who had been “living in a bunk bed,” to grow into a real company.⁠[1][2][2]

The pre-seed investor Boost VC invested in the company in 2019, and its website portfolio lists the company in New York and marks the investment as exited. In its tenth-anniversary announcement in September 2022, Boost VC named Nifty Gateway, together with Unstoppable DomainsUnstoppable DomainsUnstoppable Domains is a domain name company founded in 2018 by Matthew Gould and others. It first became known for blockchain-based Web3 domains such as .crypto, .nft, and .wallet and reached a valuation of $1 billion in 2022; after becoming an ICANN-accredited registrar in 2024, it shifted its business focus to traditional DNS domain registration and trading.Open the full entry and 21shares, as companies that had grown from the pre-seed stage to $1 billion valuations in the previous 12 months.⁠[3][3][2]

Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss, the founders of Gemini, acquired Nifty Gateway in November 2019.⁠[1][1][1]

Nifty Gateway 2.0, backed by Gemini, went live on March 17, 2020, with its first works coming from the artists Michael Kagan and Lyle Owerko and the mixed martial arts fighter Cris Cyborg. The platform took a curated approach, releasing new “exhibitions” on Thursdays roughly every three weeks; Gemini handled the technology, NFTs were priced in U.S. dollars, and users could buy them with credit cards.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][4]

Crossroad, a work by the digital artist Beeple from his first NFT sale on the platform, whose image changed depending on the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, was resold for $6.6 million in February 2021, with the buyer remaining anonymous by using the platform’s art buying service.⁠[5][5][5][5]

At the height of the NFT boom in mid-2021, the platform facilitated more than $300 million in sales, and artists including Beeple and Grimes held time-limited drops on it.⁠[4][4]

Merge, an experimental project by the artist Pak, was sold on the platform over two days, with buyers purchasing combinable “mass” tokens; existing Pak collectors could buy early at $299 each, while the public sale started at $400 and rose by $25 every six hours. A total of 28,984 buyers spent more than $91.8 million on 266,444 tokens, making it the highest-grossing project in the platform’s history. The platform initially promoted it on Twitter as “the largest ever art sale by a living creator,” a claim that was not correct as a blanket statement, and a platform representative then described it instead as “one of the largest NFT drops and from a living creator.”⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

As the NFT market cooled, the company stepped away from operating a traditional marketplace in April 2024 and rebranded as Nifty Gateway Studio, shifting its focus to onchain creative projects and brand partnerships.⁠[4][4][4]

Gemini announced that the Nifty Gateway platform would close on February 23, 2026, and would enter withdrawal-only mode immediately; Gemini said the move would let it focus on building a “one-stop super app” for customers and that it would continue to support NFTs through Gemini Wallet, launched in August 2025. Users holding NFTs or U.S. dollar or ether balances could withdraw them through a linked Gemini Exchange account or to a bank account via Stripe.⁠[7][7][7][7][4][4]

The platform officially closed on April 23, 2026, and the deadline for moving assets passed with it. The company planned to preserve NFT metadata and images on its own servers in perpetuity, to continue helping users move their NFTs to wallets of their choice, and to offer a bulk withdrawal tool for users holding multiple NFTs.⁠[8][8][8][8][8]

Nifty Gateway: Official website: https://www.niftygateway.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

Gemini: Official website: https://www.gemini.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]