MakersPlace Shutdown -- How We Did It

As I said in my twitter post, it took us almost 10 months to compete the shutdown of MakersPlace due to many complex issues that had to be solved to ensure artwork would be properly preserved. Here's what we did. 

1. Because we had provided custodial wallets to users if they didn't have their own, we had tens of thousands of artworks stored in these wallets in MakersPlace. So the first thing we did was to build a mass transfer tool because it would be too tedious to for users to transfer art from these wallets manually and one-at-a-time and we didn't want to put users through this. We also wanted to pay gas fees because we didn't feel it was fair given that it was our decision to shut down.  So we built a tool that enabled a user to come to the site, see all the art they owned on a single page (or pages if too many) and push one button to transfer them to a users personal wallet.  We paid all gas fees.  Behind the scenes we built intelligence to bundle these requests together and batch them to minimize our gas fee costs.  This tech took a few weeks to build and test and was rolled out 1 month after we announced we were closing down.  At this time we also turned off minting and buying.   We gave users almost 6 months to transfer their art and during this time sent out multiple email reminders and tweeted many times.   (How Nifty was going to get users to get all their art out of their system in 1 month is beyond me.....this is completely unfeasible.  We had less than 50% of artwork moved in 1 month after we launched the mass transfer tool and this was 2 months after we announced we were shutting down...........)
   
   
2. Then came the more complex problems of the sort Nifty is also having.  Many of our tokens minted on early smart contracts pointed to artwork on IPFS through a custom MakersPlace gateway.  If we shutdown and our domain and went away, the artwork wouldn't be linked properly.  Additionally, in the very early days we were worried about making high res art available to anyone to download so some of the tokens minted on early MakersPlace contracts pointed only to a low res version on IPFS and the high res version could only be accessed on MakersPlace servers by the owner.  To solve these issues, we had to properly evaluate many approaches, finalize the right approach and then implement and this took a few months to work out.  Here's what we did:
   
   
1. We first looked at whether we could find a way to modify the URI in the tokens to point directly to the art on IPFS without using our custom gateway, but in order to do that, based on the way our smart contracts were written, we would have to get owner approval and we felt that building the tech and actually getting users to approve would be almost impossible for the number of artworks and owners we were dealing with and we were worried about making a mistake and linking to the wrong artwork which would make the issue even worse.  So we abandoned this idea and looked for other better approaches. 
   
   
2. We also had discussions with a few very important creators who were affected to see if there was any interest in reminting the artwork and exchanging the new token for the old token for the owners that had them.  This also would have been technically complex and creators didn't want to modify the history and provenance of the token.  We also felt many users would be hesitant to do this because they would have had to burn their old token and trust that they'd get a new one from a company going out of business.  For these reasons we ruled out this approach. 
   
   
3. So after discussions with quite a few key players in the industry, we found a partner (who won't be named for confidentiality reasons) that agreed to perpetually maintain our custom IPFS gateway.  In order for that to happen we had to license our domain and custom IPFS gateway to them with the agreement that if anyone purchased MakersPlace assets the domain and gateway would be returned. This solved the biggest issue we had to deal with to ensure art would be preserved.    
   
   
4. But the above didn't solve the issue for the small number of tokens that had high res art stored only on our servers.   To sort this out, we built a mapping mechanism that was then implemented by OpenSea, Rarible and other marketplaces that we worked with so that if there was a request in those systems to view or download artwork from these tokens, the high res version would be returned even if the token still pointed to the low res version. As part of this effort we moved all high res artwork stored on our servers to IPFS so that it would be retrieved through this mapping mechanism.
   
   
5. We also needed to make sure our data / artwork would be perpetually maintained on IPFS even after we shut down so  partnered with Pinata and worked out an approach for them to do this.  This was critical to ensure that all artwork and data would be maintained perpetually even after shutdown. 
   
   
3. Even after everything we did in #2 above, we still had a problem.  Even after months of email reminders and twitter posts, we still had users who hadn't moved their artwork from custodial wallets in our site.  While it wouldn't have been completely unreasonable, given all the steps we had taken, to just say we'd done enough and shutdown, this would have made it impossible for the tokens to be transferred to the owners wallet.   Because we wanted to do the right thing, we worked out a partnership with MetaKeep that allowed us to transfer any remaining tokens out of MakersPlace to them and provide users with a process to claim and transfer them to their wallets from MetaKeep using their MakersPlace email address.  This enabled us to ensure there was no artwork left in MakersPlace. 
   
   
4. Although it hasn't really been a part of the twitter discussion, we also did a 6 month reachout to any user who had $s or ETH owed to them but hadn't transferred it our of our system.  We wanted to make sure everyone was properly paid.  (There is no way this could be completed in 1 month as Nifty is attempting).  We also didn't make the process complex -- just required users to make sure we had the proper paypal or wallet address and then push a button. 
   
   
5. Finally, since we now had ensured all artwork was preserved and out of MakersPlace and all creators were paid, we were ready to actually shutdown but we took one final step.  Since we had a partner who was maintaining our domain, we created a simple html page that enabled us to thank our users, tell a short version of the MakersPlace story and provide a FAQ that answered questions and showed users how to retrieve tokens from MetaKeep if necessary.  This is still alive today at MakersPlace.com.   From our announcement that we were shutting down in January of 2025, to the point that we took the final steps to shutdown the company and site, it took almost 10 months. 
   
   It should be noted that our intention was always to do the right thing for the community, and it took no outside pressure for us to make this decision.  This decision was made even before we publically announced we were shutting down.  Our board was 100% supportive of this also and gave us the time and budget to do it right.  It did take us a while to finalize and implement our plans for the reasons explaned above and we chose to stay silent publicly until we could announce what we were doing. with confidence  This caused a few people to assume we weren't doing anything to preserve art and that couldn't have been farther from the truth.  Hope this post clears up any misconceptions anyone had about this.