- Images for Nike-owned RTFKT’s Clone X and Animus NFTs vanished due to a Cloudflare hosting issue tied to a contract lapse.
- RTFKT’s team plans to move the image files on-chain using Arweave to avoid future downtime.
- The incident reignited concerns over off-chain storage for NFTs, highlighting risks when digital assets rely on third-party servers.
Images from several big Ethereum NFT collections tied to RTFKT, the Nike-acquired digital brand that was shut down last year, just straight up vanished from view earlier today. Turns out, it wasn’t some huge hack or blockchain bug… it was a Cloudflare issue. Yep, the hosting service apparently dropped the ball.
The flagship Clone X collection—yep, the one made with Takashi Murakami—and the Animus drop both went blank. Instead of flashy art, holders got a black screen with some white text: “This content has been restricted.” Not a great look. The problem? The images weren’t stored on-chain but were hosted elsewhere. Big oof.
Samuel Cardillo, RTFKT’s Head of Tech, hopped on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) and said Cloudflare downgraded their contract to a free plan early by mistake, which killed the display functionality. The contract wasn’t even supposed to expire yet. Basically, everything just blinked out because of an early expiration on hosting.
He also mentioned that internal talks about switching infrastructure had been going on since December—when Nike decided to sunset the brand—but actual movement didn’t really happen until this month. Classic delay spiral.
Now, this sparks the whole debate again: why are NFT images even off-chain to begin with? A lot of folks still think NFTs are just “forever” because they’re on the blockchain, but surprise—most of the artwork and metadata aren’t. So if the external server goes down, your $10K jpeg might be toast.
This isn’t new, either. Remember when 3LAU sold that $11 million NFT album and it went missing because the host platform dropped it? Or when FTX went belly-up and some NFT collections lost their image links entirely? It’s happened. More than once.
Anyway, some of the RTFKT images are coming back now that Cloudflare fixed things, but Cardillo says he’s done with relying on third-party hosts. He’s teaming up with AR Drive to push all Clone X and Animus assets on-chain using Arweave—so no more black screens, hopefully.
He estimates the migration will cost about $2,800 for 200GB of data. Honestly, not bad if it means no more art going MIA.
To top it off, RTFKT officially shut down last December. Nike had bought them in 2021, rode the hype, and is now moving on. But hey, at least they left behind some digital sneakers and a few lessons on why decentralizing storage actually matters in Web3.
