CNN decided that it was time to say goodbye to the Vault by CNN on Monday afternoon.
In the summer of 2021, Vault by CNN launched as a marketplace for its own NFTs that would allow people to own a piece of history. CNN reports of key events or artistic interpretations inspired by them, created digital collectibles that owners could show off somehow or trade with others, like baseball cards. While the prices of cryptocurrencies were sky-high, the news about NFTs didn't include phrases like " trading volumes collapse 97 percent since January peak"
CNN pulled in more than $300,000 from the sales during the "crypto winter", according to an April report.
CNN's vault lasted 16 times.
While the Vault website will be changed, it will still be available for owners to view their collections and use its marketplace. Reactions from the community included shock, disappointment, and a few posters saying they planned to contact their lawyers.
CNN said it will compensate the thousands of people who joined it in the experiment with distributions based on the purchase price of each wallet. FLOW token or stable coins will be deposited into each collector's wallet according to a separate message from CNN. The distribution amount is expected to be 20% of the original mint price for each vault NFT. The actual media for the NFTs is stored in a distributed file system that should mean they will still be available even if CNN goes away.
After they expected that CNN would get more support than other NFT projects, they don't seem to have enough to be reassured. One message in the channel said, "You can't simply say goodbye but your NFTs are still ok and now more rare... without a community and no utility..."
The same system that underpins NBA Top Shot and NFL All Day is used by the Vault. TheUSDC stable coin is pegged to the value of the US dollar at a minimum of $10 per transaction with a $4 processing fee, according to Flow. If you own one of the cheapest NFTs on CNN, you won't get a return unless you withdraw it.
I spoke to a person who said they had purchased as much as $11,000 worth of CNN token from its marketplace. They don't have a reason to think the collection's value will stay close to that level without ongoing support and a 20 percent rebate.
CNN pushed community members to buy more token so they could have enough to attend the Art of Voting NFT Series on November 8th. The Art of Voting set and other exclusive benefits are only available to those who own at least one NFT from a specific set. The section describing the fabled "utility" was included in the documentation for the vault. Later this year, people will be able to mint any CNN article as an NFT if they want to, according to a promised feature.
A broken Discord link and little activity can be seen in an Associated Press NFT marketplace.
Things haven't improved since the Wall Street Journal wrote "NFT Sales are Flatlining" on May 3rd of this year. CNN Vault was able to last 16 times longer than the CNN Plus streaming effort that died one month after launch.
The most recent transaction before the announcement occurred five days ago, on October 5th, when someone bought a CNN Defining Moment token for $77.
CNN's plan to "burn" unsold NFTs, which it says will make the ones they hold rarer, was mentioned in the message, as well as thanking the people who joined the experiment. CNN did not refer to the project as an experiment until today, when the message about the shutdown was sent. The six-week experiment mentioned in the message was an internal test, according to the publicist.
CNN was one of many brands who launched NFTs during the last couple of years but failed to meet community expectations.
NBA star De'Aaron Fox is accused of a rug pull after his Swipathefox project collected 1.5 million and shut down without delivering the promised benefits, or the Player's Only NFT effort promoted by athletes like Michael Carter- Williams and Jerami Grant.
Prices and activity on NBA Top Shot have fallen sharply from their peaks, it is unclear how NFL All Day is doing, and the NHL announced plans to launch an NFT marketplace in July. A few days ago, Lucky Trader reported that the UFC Strike NFT marketplace credited recent buyers with partial refunds after a user apparently exploited several recent drops to obtain rare items.
The Associated Press courted controversy by launching an NFT marketplace just as prices peaked in January with the stated intention of using proceeds to fund journalism. There is little to no activity on many recent drops and a link on the page pointing to the project's Discord doesn't work.
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