John Knopf@johnknopf
I wanted to weigh in on the closure of Foundation and what’s happening across NFT platforms.
I used to think sending royalties to zero was the biggest rug pull in this space.
Turns out giving platforms a percentage of every sale was bigger.
Artists onboarded because we were promised perpetual royalties.
We stayed because our sales lived on-chain, surfaced through platforms that gave our work web3 “credibility.”
But that credibility was rented.
Now platforms we paid millions to are shutting down. Others are raising fees. Auction histories are disappearing.
And suddenly “provenance” depends on whether a company still exists to display it.
All the data is on Ethereum.
But the visibility, trust, and market access were not.
Those were controlled by the platforms.
We already knew “not your keys, not your wallet.”
Now it’s clearer: not your gallery, not your legacy.
Web3 was supposed to break the traditional gallery model.
Instead, we rebuilt it on new rails and handed the power right back.
In the traditional art world, galleries promote artists because their revenue depends on it. They have limited space, they have no other option. Curation comes with support, it has to. In web3, platforms scaled curation without this responsibility. They can essentially have unlimited amounts of art with no real obligation to help them succeed.
That’s not a partnership. That’s extraction dressed as opportunity.
But imo this isn’t the end of the story, it’s the beginning.
If this space is actually different, then artists need to act like it. Not waiting for small-team ultra curated platforms to validate our work, but owning identity, provenance, and relationships directly.
Most of us believe in what we’re doing here for the future generations of artists, it’s why we haven’t left, but If anything is going to change, it definitely WILL NOT come from platforms.
It comes from us… 🖤
