JPEG Store Is Shutting Down, Here’s How To Move Your Cardano NFTs To WayUp Safely
Episode by Peter Bui on May 22nd, 2026
JPEG Store has been the dominant NFT marketplace in the Cardano ecosystem for a long time, so its shutdown is more than just another platform announcement. For creators, collectors, and project teams with active listings, it creates an immediate operational question: where do those listings go next, and how much needs to be done before the JPEG Store interface disappears?
In this tutorial-style episode, Peter walks through a real migration from JPEG Store to WayUp, using his own wallet and live listings to show what the process actually looks like. Rather than speaking in generalities, he checks the wallet transaction, verifies the destination contracts on Cardanoscan, and highlights an important timing detail around the shutdown window.
Why the JPEG Store shutdown matters
According to Peter, the broader NFT marketplace environment has been under pressure for a while. He points out that this is not unique to Cardano, noting that other NFT platforms on other chains have also shut down because the economics of running the infrastructure, the website, and the surrounding support operations have become harder to justify in a weaker market.
That context matters because it changes how Cardano NFT users should think about the event. This is not simply a brand change or feature update. It is a reminder that marketplace infrastructure is not permanent, and users need to understand where their listings actually live and what happens when the interface they rely on is switched off.
How the WayUp migration works
The practical focus of the episode is the migration option now available on WayUp, a marketplace project Peter describes as coming from the Ada Anvil team. After connecting his wallet and logging into the platform, he shows that WayUp can detect and display listings that were originally created through JPEG Store.
That matters because it reduces the friction for users who still want their NFTs listed for sale. Instead of manually delisting every asset and recreating every listing from scratch, the platform offers a migration flow that moves the listings into a new marketplace contract.
What users should check before signing
Peter walks through the wallet prompt and explains what he is looking for before approving the transaction. The key point is not to blindly sign because a platform says the migration is available. Users should still inspect the source and destination addresses, read any available metadata, and confirm that the transaction matches the intended move from the old marketplace contract into the new one.
That is where an explorer becomes useful. Peter checks the transaction on Cardanoscan to confirm that the source is the JPEG Store ask contract and that the destination is the WayUp contract. Even for experienced users, this kind of verification is a good habit. It helps separate a clean migration flow from guesswork.
Why contract verification matters
One of the more useful parts of the episode is the reminder that NFTs do not disappear just because a website goes offline. The listings and assets are still governed by smart contracts. What changes is the interface layer that makes those contracts easy to use.
That distinction is important for less technical users. If someone misses the ideal migration window, the assets are not automatically gone. But the process of recovering or relisting them may become less convenient once the original interface is no longer there. In other words, the smart contract layer gives users durability, while the interface layer gives them convenience.
Peter also highlights an interesting detail while reviewing the transaction: the explorer view can expose extra context around contracts, including audit references. For users who do not normally inspect transactions, this can be a useful confidence check during migrations like this.
Why acting before the UI shutdown is still the safer move
The episode closes with an important clarification around timing. Peter says he asked for confirmation on whether the migration can still happen after the JPEG Store website goes down. The answer was effectively yes at the smart contract level, but with a caveat: there may be contract mismatches or edge cases that make some listings harder to handle cleanly after the fact.
That is the practical takeaway. Even if migration remains technically possible later, it is still better to test and complete the move while the JPEG Store interface is live. That way, if anything does not transfer properly, users still have time to delist manually and recreate the listing on WayUp.
For NFT holders, this is less about panic and more about maintenance. If assets are still listed, it is worth checking them now, reviewing the migration path, and confirming the move works while the old tooling is still available.
Key Takeaways
- JPEG Store is shutting down, so NFT holders should review and migrate active listings before the interface goes offline.
- WayUp offers a migration feature that can pull in existing JPEG Store listings and move them into a new marketplace contract.
- The migration requires a wallet signature, so users should review the transaction addresses and metadata before confirming.
- Cardanoscan can be used to verify that assets moved from the JPEG Store ask contract into the WayUp contract.
- Supporting active marketplaces helps keep NFT trading infrastructure alive during a weak market cycle.
- The JPEG Store website going offline does not necessarily mean NFTs are lost, because the assets remain in smart contracts.
- There may still be contract mismatch edge cases, so testing the migration before the UI shutdown is the safest approach.
Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only. Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice. Always do your own research.
Text Transcript
JPEG Store, the biggest NFT marketplace on the Kaduna ecosystem, is shutting its doors. Now, the guys announced this about a month ago, and we’ve had a month essentially to start migrating away all of our NFTs to different marketplaces, delist them, and then relist them elsewhere. The process is pretty straightforward, but I wanted to take you through a nice way to do it. I haven’t tried it yet myself, so we’ll fumble through this to work out how to do it. So that way, your NFTs are still listed somewhere. Now, if you miss this window of delisting your NFTs, it’s okay. They’re still in the smart contracts, just that the interface, the website, JPEG Store will be down. Now, they’re ceasing because the NFT marketplace ecosystem is pretty much drying up. They’re not the only NFT marketplace that’s closing down. If you look at other blockchains, another really big one out there for artists is called Foundation. That’s an EVM-based one, and they shut their doors late last year as well. So there’s a lot of NFT marketplaces that are just closing up shop because it just costs too much to run all the infrastructure and all the teams and everything around it to make it worthwhile. So let’s go through this tutorial here where I take down all of my NFT listings from JPEG Store. So if you go to the JPEG Store site here, you can see across the top here, they are shutting down. You can read a little bit more information about that. Now, one big NFT marketplace that is taking over right now is WayUp. Now, this is from the team of Ada Anvil. Cash is leading up this project, plus all their awesome developers. I’ve met a couple of them in the past, so they do some really cool things. And they’ve been working quietly along in the background to make things keep on running for those that do have NFTs and do still want to trade them. So the really cool thing here, I’ve already logged into this site and connected my wallet. They’ve got a migration feature here. So here you can see all my listings. And what they do is they actually pull in all my listings that were from JPEG Store. So all these were actually listed on the JPEG Store side of things. So I believe JPEG Store will get the royalties and all that stuff. So there’s an easy way here now to click on Migrate, and this will migrate all my current listings here. These are all my NFTs, my WAPU collection. You can migrate them all over to the WayUp site. So I’m just going to click that Migrate button, and my wallet is now asking me to sign a transaction here. So it says send transaction from there, transaction summary, what’s going on here. From address is that one. So I’m assuming that is from JPEG Store, and then it’s going to a new address here. And I’m assuming this one is the new WayUp smart contract address, and it’s my, okay. So, and the message and the metadata there is of the WayUp transaction. So it looks okay to me. I’m just going to click Confirm and sign away this transaction. And I’m assuming now that’s ticking away in the background. Oh, there we go. Transaction submitted. Nice. So now I can check that transaction on KedanoScan and make sure that it is working the way I expect it to. So that was the from address. So let me just expand that one and have a look at it. And here we go. We can see it at the top here. So JPEG Store ask V1 contract. So that is definitely the contract for JPEG Store. And if you look further down here, it’s got an audit attached to it as well. So you can see the audit of this contract, which is really cool. I’ve never noticed that before. If we look at this one here, this one should be a contract for a WayUp. Yeah, there we go. WayUp contract. So I’m moving what this migration is doing is moving my NFTs from the JPEG Store contract over to the WayUp contracts and now WayUp gets the platform feeds for it. So there we go. So you might as well, if you’re still selling your NFTs, if you still want people to get them, you might as well support the platform that is selling it so that they get the fees, the little bit of ADA there so they can continuously support the platform and make sure you can sell your NFTs. So I’ve got these. These are my Cardano Press Wapus there to access content on the LearnCardano.io website. So you can get to them still. I might have to lower these prices. They’re a little bit high these days, I think. Oh no, hang on. How much is 200 ADA worth? Not much at all. Okay, it’s not too bad. All right. So the migration’s done. I thought that was quite easy. I don’t know why I was putting it off for so long. So if you guys haven’t done the migration yet, it is really easy. All you have to do is go over to the WayUp website, wayup.io, connect your wallet, sign up for an account. You do need to sign up for an account. You need to use an email. That email account can then manage all of your wallet accounts. So with this one account here, I can link multiple NFT wallets together and they all get aggregated into the same main listing, main account that controls all your listings. So it’s pretty much like how JPEG Store worked as well, which is really good. So you kind of have like a seamless transaction, a seamless transition from JPEG Store over to WayUp. So support the ecosystem, guys. Support the teams that are still building here in this bear market. If you do have NFTs, move your NFTs over. Now, I also did get a confirmation in regards to the deadline of this migration process. And I want to know exactly how long we had, because the UI, the interface for JPEG Store will go down on the 23rd of May. But this is a smart contract to smart contract migration. So I had to ask Cash here and Ada Angel. So he replied here with, yes, sir, however, there might be some contract mismatches. So best to test before the UI goes down. So that’s good to know. So that way you can still delist some things if they didn’t quite migrate over manually and then upload them again on the WayUp platform. So just had to clarify that you can migrate after the website goes down, the JPEG Store website goes down, but there may be some edge cases where things don’t migrate properly. So good to know. Thank you for clarifying that. If you found this video tutorial useful, please hit that thumbs up, like, subscribe. This is being posted on my secondary channel, which is all about video tutorials and beginner guides and getting people into crypto in general. So you may not have actually subscribed to this channel. So look for that subscribe button down there and make sure you’re subscribed. Also got links to my main channel as well, where I report news and updates around the Midnight and the Cardano ecosystem. So if you’re not subscribed to that one, check that one out too. If you want to support the channel, memberships down below, like, subscribe, buy me a coffee, all that stuff and stay optimistic, guys. I’ll see you in the next video.
Comments