The NFT party is over and everybody now owes storage rent

In 2021, Christie's sold a Beeple NFT for $69.35 million, and Sotheby's took another $24.40 million for 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, giving cartoon primates the kind of auction-house treatment usually reserved for Fabergé eggs.But now, not five years later, one of the marketplaces that helped sell the digital art revolution is explaining how customers could take their belongings with them when it closed.Nifty Gateway, the NFT marketplace owned by crypto exchange Gemini, announced its closure in January as its parent decided to concentrate on its primary financial app. The exit arrangements included plans for a bulk withdrawal tool and somewhere to host the artwork.That's a pretty sad and uneventful end for an industry that made ownership sound like a technological breakthrough on the order of discovering fire.To be fair, there was real art underneath the sales pitch, along with artists who'd found paying audiences and collectors who liked what they bought. But the boom encouraged the assumption that once you'd paid for the token, the business of owning the thing was taken care of, preferably forever.Marketplace closures have quickly made that assumption incorrect, because the tok...