The NFT market has taken another hit today as a number of South Korean companies have shut down their NFT business ventures.

Hyundai and KT Close Their NFT Services

Among those who have given up on web3 business pursuits are Netmarble, KT Corporation, and Hyundai. KT Corporation alone boasts more than $32 billion in revenue and assets, and its NFT platform MINCL is shuttering on March 4^th. This affects the digital KT Wiz Rookie Pack NFTs, which are collectible cards that feature the corporation’s own baseball team. Users will have the chance to send those tokens to their wallets outside of their MINCL accounts, so they will not lose the digital cards entirely. Once the service shuts down, though, the cards will no longer be accessible on the MINCL platform.

KT Corporation released a statement concerning its reasons for shutting down this division, saying only that it was necessitated by “shifting business conditions”. The MINCL platform has been around since April of 2022 and offered users the ability to create NFTs, trade them, and keep them in a digital wallet.

Hyundai is killing off its digital token platform as well, which falls under the purview of the Hyundai Department Store and is called H.NFT. This will be shutting down in March as well. Like the KT Corporation, Hyundai started its digital wallet service and NFT operations back in April of 2022. What was once a hot business commodity is now losing favor among major corporations. The interest in NFTs is rapidly falling.

A Marketplace Shift

Market analysts from Medium, Bloomberg, and more all report that interest in NFTs is only at a fraction of where it was a couple years ago. While some predict a comeback for the digital business, the writing is on the wall.

Consumer interest in NFTs has dropped over the last two years by about 76% each year. That kind of major consumer loss makes most corporations want to get out without too much loss of revenue. It is apparent that NFTs have fallen out of favor, and much of the problem could be traced back to marketplace scams, where NFTS are used for money laundering, theft, and other illegal activities. There are still prevalent NFT scams that are affecting the market negatively, particularly on social media where scammers make promises of large cryptocurrency payouts for people who will mint NFTs for them on disreputable websites.

Expect to see more companies give up on NFTs in the coming months or shift their focus to less risky digital trading ventures.