WazirX NFT Marketplace Demise Sparks Controversy

The crypto community has lashed out at the WazirX’s unannounced closure of its non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace

WazirX faced the wrath of the artist community after it decided to sunset the NFT marketplace without consulting stakeholders. The frustrated community members lashed out, saying they would boycott future products from the co-founders Nischal Shetty and Sandesh Suvarna.

Now the artists will loose their royalties, collectors are stuck with their collections.
90% of the creators got demotivated and left the NFT space. 50% of collectors did the same.
I am stuck with 140+ collected NFTs myself.

— Arijitmondal.eth 📷 Celebrating Photography 📷 (@arijitmondal1) February 24, 2023

WazirX announced the closing down of the marketplace due to low volume and traction. The platform further claimed that in the past month, there were only 71 unique active wallets, 354 transactions, and a volume of some $112.

The platform was already shuttered days before Friday’s Twitter announcements. When the community discovered the sunset message on the website, they criticized the team for not maintaining proper communication.

Simran Hazra, an artist on WazirX, told BeInCrypto that she finds it “hard to believe” that the platform ghosted them. It is worth noting that she raised INR 400,000 ($4,820) for Assam flood relief through the WazirX NFT Marketplace.

Manish Patole, an NFT artist who has been on the platform since its initial days, told BeInCrypto that the team wasn’t even aware of a Cloudflare error on the website before the community pointed it out. Patole adds that the co-founders should answer the community through an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session.

NFT artist BusiBeast suggested that the WazirX team should help the community to form a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) around the platform. He ran a poll wherein 77.5% of community members showed interest in the DAO formation.

The co-founder Shetty clarified on Twitter that the platform’s shutdown is not a rug pull because NFTs are always in the custody of participants. But, some artists believe they have been abandoned.

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