The image tied to the popular Ethereum NFT collection was temporarily lost on April 24th, with collectors leaving blank screens and notifications about service violations.
Glitch follows the closure of RTFKT, the digital studio behind the collection, which was closed by Nike in December 2024.
Samuel Cardillo, former RTFKT technology director, confirmed that efforts are ongoing to prevent similar disruptions in the future.
Source: RTFKTWhy did NFT disappear?
Images from RTFKT’s clone X and Animus collection have disappeared after CloudFlare downgraded the accounts responsible for providing files. The downgrade that Cardillo said happened a few days before the paid contract expired, and content restrictions were applied.
Instead of displaying the NFT image, the holder saw a typical black screen with a message indicating that the content was restricted due to violating CloudFlare’s terms of service. This happened because files were hosted off-chain and delivered through CloudFlare’s services, rather than being stored directly on the Ethereum blockchain.
Although the NFT itself was not affected, the tokens, metadata and ownership records remained on-chain, the incident underscored the risk of relying on centralized hosting to display NFT content.
Source: Samuel CardilloWhat’s next for RTFKT?
RTFKT as a company was closed by Nike in late 2024, but its collection continues to exist and is distributed in the secondary market. To protect the media assets associated with these collections, Cardillo has announced its migration to Arweave, a distributed storage network that allows users to store files permanently.
Using AR Drive, a tool built to interface with Arweave, the team plans to move around approximately 200GB of image data by the end of April. The purpose of this migration is to eliminate reliance on services such as CloudFlare and ensure that holders continue to view NFTs regardless of interruption of third-party services.
The storage movement is estimated to cost around $2,800 and is intended to provide a more reliable solution for long-term access to RTFKT’s NFT-linked digital files.
