CNN has abandoned its NFT project, and investors are not happy

Need more proof that the NFT craze has died down? CNN has given up on Vault, the company's NFT marketplace, after just one year.

The company has recently announced it's shutting down the Vault (via The Verge). Without going into specifics about the shutdown, CNN said the Vault was originally launched as a six-week experiment, but it was later expanded into "something much larger."

CNN launched the Vault in June 2021, in which it sold NFTs (non-fungible tokens) called Moments, based on some of CNN's "historical moments." For example, you could get an NFT based on a CNN report that George W. Bush was re-elected for the low, low price of $500.

The Vault by CNN site is still live, and it appears that you can still purchase NFTs there. There's no word on when or if it will be shut down completely.

Here is a primer on what NFTs are and how they work. Suffice to say that they're cryptocurrency tokens where each NFT has unique properties and cannot be duplicated, and that many of them were very expensive during the height of their popularity in 2021 and early 2022.

CNN's take on NFTs now looks bizarre, though it's not much different from numerous other companies jumping on the bandwagon. The NFT market, however, is not what it was, with sales volumes dropping significantly and many NFTs which were previously sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars now unable to find a buyer. According to DappRadar's data, NFT marketplace OpenSea now typically has a daily volume of about $10 million in sales, down from hundreds of millions per day in January and February this year.

As for CNN's Vault and its demise, suffice to say the news did not sit well with people who bought and/or traded CNN's NFTs. The comments on the site's official Discord, as well as on Twitter, mostly range from anger to jokes about rug pulls, which in crypto lingo means grabbing some quick cash and then suddenly abandoning a project, leaving investors in the dirt.

According to The Verge, CNN said in its Discord channel that it plans to compensate “thousands of collectors” for “roughly 20% of original mint price” for each NFT, but it’s still working on the details.