From the collector’s perspective, there’s great anxiety. Now, the files associated with over 41,000 NFTs from CloneX and Animus collections have disappeared. This event underscores doubts on the permanence and durability of NFT storage solutions. The durability of NFTs as a whole, especially projects containing complex artworks. The sudden disappearance has sparked fears throughout the NFT world, particularly as those digital assets were valued at nearly half a trillion dollars at their peak.
CloneX's Rise and Fall
RTFKT, in partnership with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, released CloneX in late 2021. The collection of 20,000 NFT avatars became an instant craze in the midst of the bull market. At their height, the least expensive CloneX NFTs sold for prices over $63,000, with rarer individual pieces selling for well over a million dollars.
The market has since shifted dramatically. To put that in perspective, CloneX NFTs now sell for an average of about $300 per NFT — a massive drop in value. Animus, a highly-anticipated sequel project launched in 2022, struggled to find an audience, further dampening the mood surrounding RTFKT’s NFT-based products.
The Disappearing Art
A recent disappearance of art associated with the CloneX and Animus NFTs only supercharged fears. These pictures were either hosted on traditional web servers, or on decentralized, permanent file storage like Arweave. RTFKT had moved to Arweave after dealing with problems associated with Cloudflare, looking to a more permanent storage option.
"Nobody likes to see their content lost, especially due to a mistake made by a cloud provider, and especially when it’s 30,000 plus NFT images." - Phil Mataras
Arweave focuses on permanent storage, maintaining data forever after an initial one-time purchase, and using a decentralized method and open ledger to do so. Phil Mataras commented on Arweave's storage capabilities, stating:
"Once uploaded, these images will stay put, forever." - Phil Mataras
While the promise of permanent storage seems like it should provide a fail-safe solution, the last few weeks have exposed how these systems can be compromised.
Centralized vs. Decentralized Storage
The CloneX incident is just one example demonstrating the long-term discussion around centralized versus decentralized storage for NFTs. Examples of NFTs that have all image data on-chain include CryptoPunks. This is possible, since CryptoPunks images are just tiny amounts of data. NFTs featuring higher resolution images are often stored off-chain, on centralized servers or through decentralized storage networks such as IPFS. Dependence on central servers is an increasingly dangerous proposition. When Rally Global went under in 2023, users lost access to the NFTs hosted on its centralized platform.
