We regret to announce that we will be discontinuing our Hive-Engine based NFT trading platform, NFTMart, effective May 26th, 2025. This decision was not made lightly, and we want to share our reasoning with our valued community.
Why We've Made This Decision
Over the years, our team has deeply invested in the Hive-Engine ecosystem - developing custom tooling, running nodes, and contributing to the codebase. One of our team members even maintained what was for many years the most popular and reliable Hive-Engine node for public use.
However, we've encountered persistent technical limitations that have made it increasingly difficult to deliver the quality service our users deserve:
Technical Constraints: Hive-Engine's architecture has posed significant challenges. For instance, the unchangeable grouping parameter has meant that marketplaces relying on basic functionality would potentially be misrepresenting NFTs to users. While we invested in building custom infrastructure to work around this issue, these types of limitations shouldn't require such extensive workarounds.
Recent Policy Changes: The introduction of transaction limits per block and new fee structures with less than a week's notice and no opt-in process has raised serious concerns about future stability and predictability. Particularly concerning is that with no required changes on the user side, many may end up paying fees without even realizing it. Users who transacted on more than 50 NFTs at once (a major reason that many use NFTMart) would get charged BEED or have their transaction fail. We don't know what other changes might come in the future, and we don't have the capacity to make changes with such short notice.
Underlying Performance Issues: Rather than addressing core optimization problems within the chain itself, these new limitations appear to be workarounds that shift the burden to developers and users.
Limited Upgrade Path: Our team even explored reimplementing aspects of the Hive-Engine blockchain to overcome these limitations, but discovered that the subpar performance and constantly changing contracts make this prohibitively complex for our resources.
Looking Forward
We remain deeply grateful to the witnesses and volunteers who have worked tirelessly on Hive-Engine, often without compensation. Their dedication is commendable.
To our users: we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this discontinuation may cause. Your support has meant everything to us. Based on recent developments and hints about future changes, we believe it's in everyone's best interest to explore alternative sidechain solutions that can provide the stability and scalability needed for long-term growth.
Thank you for your understanding and continued support.