News Update

WazirX shutters NFT marketplace without warning to its customers

• ByStartupStory     |    February 23, 2023

Indian crypto exchange WazirX has shut down its NFT marketplace, WazirX NFT, with immediate effect.  

It has been closed down without warning to its artists or customers. 

“The WazirX NFT marketplace has been sunsetted. You can still trade your NFTs on OpenSea,” the website of the marketplace displayed. 

Upon clicking the OpenSea link, users can buy or sell the NFTs bought on the WazirX marketplace.  Currently, the OpenSea profile of the Indian crypto exchange has 52,253 items on sale.

The marketplace, a project once marketed as India’s best non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace, has closed its operations. The team or the founders made no public announcement or communications regarding sunsetting the platform.

WazirX started with the NFT market place in February 2021. At the time of the launch, the company had said that NFTs available were minted on its parent company Binance Technology’s blockchain technology.

Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange acquired WazirX in 2019.

This comes amid a long crypto winter that has witnessed trillions of dollars being wiped out from the industry over the last one year. Two initial strikes that broke the industry’s back were bankruptcies of Three Arrow Capital and Celsius Network. The crisis only deepened when lid was blown off from Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. The ongoing legal proceedings and the investor money that’s been at stake has only increased the concerns towards crypto.

The Indian exchange WazirX has been in a dispute with Binance over the ownership of the platform since last August. Earlier this month, Binance announced cutting its ties with WazirX by terminating its wallet services. Then the Indian exchange declared that it had prepared to take necessary steps to seek recourse against “false and misleading” statements from Binance.

WazirX, in India laid off about 40 per cent of its workforce in October last year to ‘weather the crypto winter’.

 

 

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