Remember NFTs? They’re “here to stay,” Reddit said in a 2021 report on the Next Big Thing, the year before it launched its NFT-based marketplace that enabled redditors to earn or purchase their own customizable avatars for the platform. Three years later, the situation has changed somewhat, and at least as far as Reddit’s concerned, well, NFTs are going away.
Reddit actually announced the end of the program in August, talking about how wonderful and “extraordinary” the whole thing was—”You transformed Reddit by showing what was possible when creators were empowered to create, play, and showcase excellence”—while simultaneously giving everyone who owns them until January 1, 2026 to export their “Vault” to a third-party wallet or service. Miss that deadline, and “you’ll be unable to transfer or sell your Collectible Avatars off-platform, and otherwise unable to access your Vault’s underlying blockchain wallet for any purpose.”
With less than a month left to go before those here-to-stay tokens are, well, not here anymore, Reddit has put out another notice reminding owners that once the clock hits zero, they’ll be out of luck. They can still use the images of course—just right-click and “save image as,” boom, there you go—but the non-fungible token that says the image is yours and yours alone will be the proverbial tears in rain: Another broken victim of humanity’s relentless, unthinking, and fundamentally cruel drive for profit, heedless of the long-term cost to our souls.
Some Reddit NFT holders are portraying the change as no big deal: The tokens still exist, they’ll just need to be accessed differently after the end of the year. That’s true as far as it goes, but it fails to address what the change means in a wider context. Reddit clearly had major expectations for NFTs, but all of that—not just on Reddit, but everywhere—has gone up in smoke.
NFTs are still out there, as are true believers, but the dogged insistence that they’re going to change the world? Just like the proverbial apes, that’s all gone, baby: A 2024 report by crypto analysis firm NFT Evening found that 96% of NFTs “are dead,” while a Yahoo Finance report from 2025 says “floor prices have collapsed, trading volumes have plunged, and the NFT market is now a shadow of its former self.”
I suppose the bright side for people who don’t export their Vaults before the deadline is that at least they’re not losing much. And hey—the apes may be gone, but we’ll always have this very special moment. Yeah, even back then, we knew.
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