In this post...
On 28 May 2026, Tiwani Contemporary โ one of the few galleries in the world with a stated commitment to contemporary African and diaspora art โ closed its doors on Cork Street in Mayfair. The lights went out while a show was still hanging. Breaking Down Realities, the final exhibition, featured Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Hadassa Ngamba, Dawit L. Petros, and Muzae Sesay โ four artists whose work deserved more than a closing notice.
The galleryโs founder, Maria Varnava, cited financial challenges and โa difficult market.โ Those carefully chosen words do not quite describe what has happened over the past four years. Auction sales of African artists peaked at $116.5 million in 2022 and have not come close since. Art X Lagos watched its exhibitor list collapse by 66 percent between 2022 and 2023. NFT marketplace after NFT marketplace has shuttered โ Nifty Gateway, MakersPlace, Async Art, Christieโs own digital art department โ taking with them the work, the wallets, and the promises that brought African artists into the blockchain space in the first place.
The market does not sustain what it discovers. It mines it.
I have been watching this for seventeen years. It is time to say it plainly.
The Promise
What We Were Told โ and Why It Made Sense
I have been running African Digital Art since 2009. Long before NFTs arrived, I was already arguing for what they appeared to offer: a way for African and diaspora artists to reach a global audience on their own terms, to retain ownership of their work, to earn money without intermediaries, to build cultural legacies that did not depend on the approval of institutions that had historically ignored them.
When NFTs emerged as a genuine possibility in 2020 and 2021, I understood the structural appeal immediately. African digital artists had been building on borrowed infrastructure for years. Instagramโs algorithm did not surface their work equitably. Tumblr โ which had been an extraordinary community for African digital art in the early 2010s, where visual work circulated through genuine aesthetic affinity โ had already collapsed under mismanagement. The blogs that shaped a generationโs visual imagination โ Africa is a Country, Another Africa, Nigerian Nostalgia, Afro-Punk, Everyday Africa โ had either died or been pushed to the margins. We were building communities on platforms that did not belong to us, always one algorithm change away from erasure.
NFTs looked structurally different. The promise was encoded: ownership on the blockchain, royalties written into the smart contract, no gallery taking 50 percent, no auction house setting the floor. When Nigerian artist Osinachi became the first African artist to sell an NFT at Christieโs London in 2021 โ his work Becoming Sochukwuma selling for $80,000 on SuperRare โ it felt like proof that something structurally new was possible. African art communities, collector networks, and artist groups formed almost overnight across Twitter, Discord, and Clubhouse. The energy was real. The visibility was real. For a moment, the infrastructure seemed to be forming on our own terms.
I believed enough of it to try to build something in this space.
What We Tried to Build
When Community Becomes Infrastructure
What convinced me to enter the NFT space was not the technology. It was the possibility of building something that gave African artists what the existing system had never given them: genuine economic participation and cultural ownership of the market itself.
In early 2022, I co-founded an NFT marketplace with that intention at its centre. The platform ran on a carbon-negative blockchain and was designed from the ground up as a community ecosystem โ not a speculation engine. It included community governance tiers, voting rights on grants to emerging artists, and a fellowship programme designed to fund hundreds of Black creators. A Johannesburg-based artist who had designed South Africaโs Mandela Centenary coin created our founding digital object โ a membership artefact rather than a collectible, built to represent an intention rather than a bet.
We launched at a major technology and culture conference in Lagos in March 2022. The energy was extraordinary. The artists who debuted through our initial programme were making work that had never been given that kind of infrastructure. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the ecosystem was catching up with the vision.
Six months later, the crypto market crashed. A year later, NFT trading volumes were in freefall. The platforms we had hoped to learn from and compete with were closing one by one. The structural reality that the gold rush had obscured became impossible to ignore.
I built something real. I am not going to pretend that what stopped it was a failure of vision.
ย
ย
โWe were not building a speculation engine. We were trying to give artists what the existing system had never given them: cultural ownership of the market itself.โ
Rented Land
When Community Becomes Infrastructure
The failure of NFTs as a liberation technology for African artists was not primarily a market failure. It was structural โ and the structure was visible from the beginning, if you looked directly at it.
Consider the basic economics. Minting an NFT on Ethereum at the height of the market could cost anywhere from a few dollars to several hundred in gas fees alone โ before a single collector had seen the work. For an artist in Lagos or Nairobi, that was not a transaction cost. That was rent. And it was not reliable rent โ gas fees fluctuated by the hour, making the cost of entering the market unpredictable every time an artist tried to participate.
The platforms that claimed to democratise art sales were denominated in cryptocurrencies whose volatility made planning impossible. They required wallets and banking access that were unevenly distributed across the continent. They ran on infrastructure โ reliable internet, stable electricity, functioning hardware โ that African artists had been navigating workarounds for since the beginning of digital practice. Ethiopian creators, in the starkest example, found themselves locked out of the basic monetisation systems of global platforms entirely โ unable to access YouTubeโs Partner Program, TikTokโs Creator Fund, or payments through PayPal and Patreon. Not because of their work. Because of where they lived.
The visibility problem compounded everything. African artists consistently reported being invisible on major NFT platforms unless their work matched what Western collectors expected โAfrican artโ to look like. Artists who had built genuinely distinctive, genre-defying practices found the NFT market as unreceptive as the gallery system it claimed to replace.
And the VC model underpinning most NFT platforms created a specific trap. These were platforms built to scale fast, capture transaction volume, and exit โ not to sustain cultural communities. When the speculative wave receded, the business model had no floor. Nifty Gateway closed in January 2025. MakersPlace shut the same month. KnownOrigin closed in July 2024. Christieโs digital art department shuttered in September 2025. NFT art trading volume dropped 93 percent โ from $2.9 billion in 2021 to $23.8 million in early 2025. The platforms were gone. The work remained โ on blockchains of uncertain maintenance, in wallets whose owners had moved on.
The art world spent the NFT years talking about decentralisation. What it built was a highly centralised dependency on platforms with the same fundamental problem as every platform before them: they were not ours.
In early 2022, I co-founded an NFT marketplace with that intention at its centre. The platform ran on a carbon-negative blockchain and was designed from the ground up as a community ecosystem โ not a speculation engine. It included community governance tiers, voting rights on grants to emerging artists, and a fellowship programme designed to fund hundreds of Black creators. A Johannesburg-based artist who had designed South Africaโs Mandela Centenary coin created our founding digital object โ a membership artefact rather than a collectible, built to represent an intention rather than a bet.
We launched at a major technology and culture conference in Lagos in March 2022. The energy was extraordinary. The artists who debuted through our initial programme were making work that had never been given that kind of infrastructure. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the ecosystem was catching up with the vision.
Six months later, the crypto market crashed. A year later, NFT trading volumes were in freefall. The platforms we had hoped to learn from and compete with were closing one by one. The structural reality that the gold rush had obscured became impossible to ignore.
I built something real. I am not going to pretend that what stopped it was a failure of vision.
ย
ย
โWe were not building a speculation engine. We were trying to give artists what the existing system had never given them: cultural ownership of the market itself.โ
What Survived the Crash
The Community, the Practice, and the Record That Remains
โThe NFT moment produced extraordinary work and genuine community. What it did not produce was a marketplace that belonged to us.โ
I want to be careful not to erase what was actually built in this period โ because it was real, even when the market beneath it was not.
Artists built practices. Between 2020 and 2023, thousands of African and diaspora artists developed digital disciplines that had not existed as professions in their communities a decade earlier: 3D modelling, motion design, generative art, digital painting techniques that merged ancestral imagery with contemporary aesthetics, animation styles that were entirely new to the world. Most of these artists were self-taught โ learning from YouTube tutorials and peer knowledge-sharing in Discord servers and Telegram groups. They built the visual language as they went. The work was extraordinary.
Communities were built. The Nigerian NFT Community, the Kenyan NFT Club, the Network of African NFT Artists, Black NFT Art โ these were not only marketing structures. They were genuine mutual-aid ecosystems: artists helping each other navigate gas fees, understand wallets, connect with collectors, and gain visibility in markets designed to overlook them. The care infrastructure was real, even when the market underneath it was not.
And ADA built a record. This platform has been documenting African digital art since 2009. The archive now holds the largest collection of its kind in the world โ not just images but artist statements, exhibition histories, interviews, and contextual essays that will outlast every platform on which the work was ever distributed. When future historians want to understand what African digital artists were making and thinking and arguing about in the 2010s and 2020s, this is where they will come.
What was not built was a marketplace. A marketplace in the full sense: a sustainable economic ecosystem in which African artists can consistently make a living, in which the value captured stays within the community, in which the infrastructure is owned and governed by the people it serves. The NFT moment produced extraordinary work and genuine community. It did not produce that marketplace. We are still waiting for it.
The Second Extraction
How AI Is Consuming What NFTs Couldn't
The NFT platforms were not the first infrastructure to fail African digital artists. They were the most recent in a pattern that goes back to the beginning of digital practice on the continent.
In the early 2010s, Tumblr was the architecture on which an entire generation built its first serious audiences. It worked because the platformโs reblog structure was genuinely egalitarian โ visual work could move across communities through aesthetic affinity rather than paid promotion. The African digital art ecosystem that Tumblr hosted was a genuine cultural space: artists discovering each other across borders, building the shared visual conversation that would define a decade of practice. The blogs that emerged from that moment โ Africa is a Country, Another Africa, Nigerian Nostalgia, Afro-Punk, Everyday Africa โ were not just publications. They were community-builders and taste-shapers, the infrastructure of a new cultural moment.
Yahoo acquired Tumblr and destroyed it. Not immediately, not dramatically โ slowly, through mismanagement and platform changes that prioritised the wrong things. The artists who had built communities there had to begin again.
Instagram replaced Tumblr. For a time it worked: the algorithm surfaced visual art, discovery was possible without paid promotion, the grid format suited the kind of work African digital artists were making. As the platform shifted toward Reels โ toward video, toward entertainment logic, toward the performance of making rather than the made thing โ static visual work became invisible. Illustrators and painters who had spent years building carefully curated feeds found their reach collapsing overnight. The algorithm decided it wanted dancing.
TikTok offered movement but demanded personality. Some artists adapted. Many couldnโt or shouldnโt have to โ because performing the act of making is a different kind of labour from making itself, and an artist should not be required to become an entertainer to justify their practice.
And then the blockchain, which was supposed to change all of this by removing the platform from the equation entirely โ which also failed, for the reasons this essay has documented.
The pattern is always the same. We build on platforms we do not control. The platform changes its priorities. We lose what we built. We rebuild somewhere else. We are always starting over on someone elseโs land.
โWe build on platforms we do not control. The platform changes. We lose what we built. We start over somewhere else. We are always on someone elseโs land.โ
After the Hype
Toward a Marketplace Built for Survival, Not Speculation
The failure of the NFT moment does not mean the problem it was trying to solve has gone away. It means we need to solve it with different tools and a clearer understanding of what we are actually building toward.
The collector base is the gap nobody wants to talk about. Every marketplace conversation focuses on the supply side: more artists, better platforms, improved discovery. What is consistently underdeveloped is demand. The African collector base remains dramatically thin relative to the scale of production. Building collector culture requires sustained investment in education, engagement, and financial infrastructure that enables African and diaspora collectors to actually participate in the market for African art. No NFT platform built this into its model. It is foundational work that cannot be skipped, delegated, or solved by a better minting interface.
Ownership of the infrastructure itself is non-negotiable. ADA is still here after 17 years because it was never VC-funded. It was never required to grow at a rate that would destroy its core purpose. It has operated as what it is: a cultural archive and community, not a growth company chasing an exit. The next marketplace needs to be owned โ structurally, legally, economically โ by the artists and communities it serves. Not by investors who will withdraw when the speculation ends. This is not idealism. It is the only model that has proven capable of outlasting hype cycles.
Realistic economics are essential. The NFT moment raised expectations to a level that was always going to collapse. A market that told self-taught artists they could expect overnight sales of thousands of dollars was not preparing anyone for a sustainable practice. What sustains artists is not a windfall โ it is consistent, predictable income that allows them to make work without constant financial anxiety. Building toward that requires a different conception of success: not auction records but recurring revenue, not viral moments but institutional relationships, not hype cycles but permanence.
The archive is an asset that has never been fully activated. ADAโs 17-year archive is the largest collection of African digital art in the world. That archive has value โ historical, cultural, aesthetic, educational โ entirely separate from any marketplace transaction. Licensing models, institutional subscriptions, partnerships with universities, museums, and publishers who need access to this material: these are revenue streams that do not depend on speculation. They depend on the thing that has already been built.
AI demands a direct response, not deferral. The question of how to protect and compensate African artists whose visual work is training AI systems cannot be delayed. It requires documentation โ which an archive provides. It requires legal coordination. It requires platform negotiation. Artists building right now need to understand what protections exist, what is being fought for, and how to participate in that fight. ADA has a role to play in that advocacy.
โWhat sustains artists is not a windfall. It is consistent, predictable income that allows them to make work without constant financial anxiety.โ
The Work Remains
What We Do with the Explosion
Between 2009 and now, something unprecedented happened. A continentโs worth of digital creative practice โ across 55 countries and the entire African diaspora โ was documented, connected, and made visible to the world. The visual artists, animators, illustrators, game designers, 3D artists, motion designers, typographers, and creative technologists who built African digital culture over this period did so largely without institutional support, without gallery representation, without formal art training, without the accumulated infrastructure that Western digital artists inherited as a matter of course.
They built it anyway. On YouTube tutorials and peer Discord servers. On laptops with slow internet. In cities managing load shedding. In diaspora apartments, making work that reached back to places they had never lived. The work is extraordinary. The community is real. The archive is 17 years of proof.
The NFT gold rush did not create any of this. It discovered it, briefly exploited it, and moved on. The gallery market did the same thing at its peak. Tiwaniโs closing is not the end of something. It is a clarification. It tells us that the market for African art โ as currently constituted, in galleries, at fairs, at auction houses, on blockchain platforms โ does not have the architecture to sustain what African artists are producing. The market that rose so dramatically between 2015 and 2022 was built on appetite, not infrastructure. When the appetite shifted, the inadequacy of what lay beneath it was exposed.
What we need is infrastructure. Not another platform. Not another marketplace promise. Infrastructure: collector culture, community ownership, realistic economics, an activated archive, direct engagement with the AI question, and the willingness to build slowly for permanence rather than quickly for the next wave of hype.
ADA has been building slowly for 17 years. We are still here. We know what the work costs. We know what it is worth. And we know that the artists who built this extraordinary visual culture deserve a market โ not a moment.
โThe market that rose so dramatically was built on appetite, not infrastructure. When the appetite shifted, the inadequacy of what lay beneath it was exposed. What we need now is infrastructure.โ
