Five months after eBay gutted 30 per cent of its web3 team, KnownOrigin has announced it is winding down its marketplace and minting services entirely. The writing was on the wall.
KnownOrigin, the Manchester-born NFT marketplace acquired by eBay in 2022, has announced it will wind down its on-chain marketplace and minting services over the coming weeks. The announcement, posted on X on July 17th, marks the final chapter for a platform that was once held up as proof that corporate interest in NFTs was here to stay.
For anyone who read our coverage of the eBay web3 layoffs back in February, this will not come as a shock. When a company cuts 30 per cent of a division and makes a co-founder redundant, it is not trimming for efficiency. It is heading for the exit.
From Layoffs to Shutdown in Five Months
In February 2024, reports emerged that eBay had slashed roughly 30 per cent of its web3 and NFT team. David Moore, one of KnownOrigin's three co-founders, was among those made redundant. Stef Jay, the division's business and strategy officer, also departed. At the time, eBay issued a statement insisting it remained committed to its web3 strategy. That commitment, it turns out, had a shelf life of about five months.
The shutdown means KnownOrigin's marketplace and minting tools will go dark. Users holding NFTs minted on the platform are being directed to secondary marketplaces such as OpenSea and Magic Eden, where their tokens can still be traded. The NFTs themselves remain on the Ethereum blockchain, but the infrastructure that supported them, including the gallery, discovery tools, and artist profiles that made KnownOrigin what it was, is being switched off.
The Storage Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Beyond the immediate loss of a marketplace, the shutdown raises a more uncomfortable question: what happens to the art itself? Most NFTs do not store the actual media on-chain. Instead, the token contains metadata pointing to files hosted off-chain, typically on IPFS. If eBay stops paying the storage bills, the artwork those tokens reference could become inaccessible, leaving collectors holding tokens that point to nothing.
Artist BrightLightArt raised exactly this concern, asking whether eBay would continue paying IPFS storage costs indefinitely. The honest answer is almost certainly no. eBay has shown no interest in maintaining a long-term commitment to a platform it is actively shutting down. Tech researcher Jonty Wareing has previously warned that NFTs function as links to off-chain files and predicted that most will break within the next decade. For KnownOrigin collectors, that timeline may have just accelerated.
A Rumoured $70 Million Lesson
eBay acquired KnownOrigin in June 2022 for a rumoured $70 million according to sources close to the deal. At the time, the platform had facilitated approximately $7.8 million in lifetime trading volume and had raised $6.22 million in total funding. Two years on, the platform is being wound down, the founding team has been scattered, and the entire web3 division has been hollowed out.
The broader NFT market has not recovered in any meaningful way. Monthly trading volumes remain a fraction of the 2021-2022 peaks, and the idea that a legacy e-commerce company could pivot into digital collectibles now looks like a case study in corporate trend-chasing. KnownOrigin was a genuine community with real artists producing real work. It deserved better than being acquired by a company that had no idea what to do with it.
What Comes Next
For artists and collectors affected by the shutdown, the options are limited. Tokens minted on KnownOrigin can still be listed and traded on OpenSea and Magic Eden. Some in the community have pointed to permanent storage solutions like Arweave, which offers one-time payment for indefinite data retention, as a potential safeguard for at-risk artwork. But migrating metadata after the fact is not straightforward, and the burden falls on individual artists and collectors rather than the corporation that pulled the plug.
KnownOrigin started in 2018 as a basement experiment linking physical art to digital tokens. It built a loyal community of over 9,000 artists and minted more than 47,000 NFTs. It was scrappy, idealistic, and genuinely loved by the people who used it. Its closure is a reminder that acquisition by a large corporation is not the same thing as being saved. Sometimes, it is just a slower way of being shut down.
