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) took notice and began to poke fun at the issue, RTFKT Head of Technology Samuel Cardillo spoke up, saying that issue arose as a result of a Cloudflare contract erroneously ending a few days early. 

“Somehow this morning Cloudflare decided to move to the Free plan a few days before the end of the contract,” Cardillo posted on X. He added that the move was what triggered the artwork no longer showing as intended on the Ethereum NFTs.

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 storage of images and other data associated with NFTs has previously been a hot topic, with many users unaware that very few NFTs place all the data associated with them—like images and metadata—on-chain along with the tokens themselves, preserving them alongside the blockchain they are associated with. 

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 central provider went missing for a time after being purchased on Nifty Gateway. And when crypto exchange FTX collapsed in late 2022, some of the NFT collections that had launched via the firm’s platform were broken due to servers no longer being online.

While images for RTFKT’s collections started to slowly reappear after Cloudflare purportedly fixed the contract issue, Cardillo is working on getting the files on-chain to avoid it from happening again. 

“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 Decrypt that around 200GB worth of files would need to be stored, which would cost around $2,800 via AR Drive according to the price calculator on its website.

RTFKT was shut down by Nike in December, three years after the sportswear giant acquired the blockchain fashion and technology company for an undisclosed sum.

Representatives for Nike and Cloudflare did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

Edited by Andrew Hayward