THE GRAVEYARDretailtoken.ai
A record of what happened to brand crypto

12 went on-chain.
11 have stopped.

Every one of these launched with a press release about the future of retail. Most were quietly switched off. The contracts were not — they cannot be — so the tokens are still sitting in wallets, still changing hands, long after the companies that made them moved on.

Walk the plots Get the data
281 transfers in the last 14 days across projects whose operators have shut down, gone quiet or unwound them. Counted directly from a public Ethereum node on 12 August 2026. Nobody is running these. They are still moving.
Recorded 12
Dead 8 Formally shut down
Dormant 2 No announcement, no activity
Contracts still live 6/6 Every single one

The plots

See all 12 recorded
Project Born Died Lived Status Still on-chain
Reddit Collectible Avatars Programme sunset; Avatar Shop closed and in-app vault removed Jul 2022 Nov 2025 3y 4m Dead no contract
Nike RTFKT / CloneX Parent company wound the studio down during a wider restructuring Nov 2021 Jan 2025 3y 2m Dead 19,764 263 trades/14d
VCR Group Flyfish Club SEC order; membership decoupled from the token Aug 2021 Sep 2024 3y 1m Absorbed 3,035 6 trades/14d
eBay KnownOrigin Wound down two years after acquisition; team laid off Jun 2022 Jul 2024 2y 1m Dead no contract
Starbucks Starbucks Odyssey Beta ended without ever leaving beta Dec 2022 31 Mar 2024 1y 3m Dead no contract
GameStop GameStop NFT Marketplace Closed citing regulatory uncertainty in crypto Jul 2022 2 Feb 2024 1y 7m Dead no contract
Meta Digital Collectibles Discontinued during a company-wide efficiency drive May 2022 Mar 2023 10 months Dead no contract
CNN Vault: Moments That Changed Us Closed abruptly; holders offered roughly 20% of mint price Jun 2021 Oct 2022 1y 4m Dead no contract

Sorted by date of death. Every entry is cited, and every on-chain figure is measured rather than repeated from somewhere else — how this is compiled.

What the record shows

Shortest life

Meta Digital Collectibles

10 months from launch to shutdown. Shipped in May, expanded in November, discontinued by March.

The plot
The pattern

Nobody plans the ending

Not one of these launched with a stated plan for what happens to holders if it stops. Two did not announce an ending at all — the subdomain simply stopped resolving one day.

Why they died
Documented spend

$14.8m taken from the public

Only counting projects where a figure is documented in a regulator's filing or a company statement. Most never disclosed one, so the real number is higher and unknowable.

Post-mortems

See all

Why they died

Five patterns that show up again and again across the record — and the one thing every survivor has in common.

Read

Tokenised loyalty, explained

The three ways loyalty schemes get put on-chain, what each one costs to run, and the single design decision that determines how complicated your life becomes.

Read

Token-gated commerce, explained

How gating a product, price or collection behind token ownership actually works end to end — the checks, the storefront integration, and the ways it breaks.

Read

NFT memberships for retail

Why a membership credential is a better first on-chain product than a coin, how to choose between ERC-721 and ERC-1155, and the design decisions you cannot undo.

Read

Corrections

Every entry here concerns a real company, so getting it wrong is the one unrecoverable mistake.

Each claim about a project ending carries a citation, and every on-chain figure is measured from a public node and dated. If something is wrong, tell us — it gets fixed promptly and the change is noted on the entry. Companies asking to correct their own record go to the front of the queue.