Cloudflare removes RTFKT CloneX NFT art due to Terms of Service violation

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RTFKT, Nike’s abandoned digital brand pronounced “artifact,” lost its CloneX art overnight.

The art for all 19,500 Ethereum NFTs in the collection was replaced with a black background with white text that reads: “This content has been restricted. Using Cloudflare’s basic service in this manner is a violation of the Terms of Service. Please visit cfl.re/tos for more.”

That URL redirects to a Cloudflare terms page that states that a more basic Cloudflare plan does not allow clients to stream videos. “We limited your ability to use our services to deliver video bits from our network to your visitors. This is because every second of a typical video requires as much bandwidth as loading a full web page,” the page reads.

“Unfortunately, while most people respect these limitations and understand they exist to ensure high quality of service for all Cloudflare customers, some users attempt to misconfigure our service to stream video in violation of our Terms of Service,” the post continues.

The issue, then, appears to be due to the fact that the CloneX NFT data was not being hosted on an adequate Cloudflare plan. Others, like Yuga Labs blockchain lead 0xQuit, speculated that RTFKT may have forgotten to pay their Cloudflare bill and saw their service cancelled (RTFKT lead Samuel Cardillo told me it has “nothing to do” with an unpaid bill)..

Other RTFKT collections — like its NFTs with artist Fewocious, its Animus Eggs, and its Nike Dunk Cryptokicks — still had visible video art live as of Thursday at 10:30am ET white the CloneX art was gone.

The CloneX shakeup appears to have happened overnight, when several X users noticed the issue and flagged it on social media.

“And some of you thought this was the next @cryptopunksnfts since it was abandoned,” Ape Ventures founder Xeer wrote early Thursday morning. Unlike most NFT collections, CryptoPunks art is stored fully onchain on Ethereum.

Because NFTs can use art or visual data that’s hosted by a centralized company — like Cloudflare or AWS — they are inherently more mutable and censorable than decentralized data storage options. The tokens will still exist — but the art associated with it can vanish or be altered.

By 11:15 am ET on Thursday, however, some of the CloneX NFT art had reappeared, suggesting the issue with Cloudflare had been resolved (By 12:30pm ET, the art had reappeared).

So what happened? RTFKT Head of Tech Samuel Cardillo said the CloneX and Animus NFTs are moving to decentralized blockchain storage platform Arweave. Cardillo added that their Cloudflare plan will end at the end of April. The team had been trying to switch their storage infrastructure since December, but the switch took longer “because of internal corpo [sic] process.”

“Somehow this morning Cloudflare decided to move to the Free plan [a] few days before the end of the contract which also triggered that bug in which Cloudflare refuses to stream images and videos,” Cardillo said.

RTFKT shut down operations in December, spurring a slew of over 3,300 CloneX sales in one day as traders gave up hope on the future of the collection.

RTFKT’s post about its shutdown at the time didn’t offer much of an explanation. It instead claimed the shutdown was “a new chapter” for the company.

“RTFKT isn’t ending. It’s becoming what it was always meant to be — an artifact of cultural revolution,” the post read.

It’s a bitter end for those who lost money on the NFTs as well as those who had longer-term hopes for the December 2021 collection. The CloneX floor price hit an all-time low earlier this month, with NFTs selling for roughly $230 worth of ETH, per NFTPriceFloor data.

In April 2022, RTFKT CloneX NFTs had a floor price of over $60,000 per NFT. Rarer CloneX NFTs have sold for prices as high as $1.25 million.

Blockworks has reached out to Cloudflare for comment.

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