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Tad Smith, chairman of Doodles and former CEO of Sotheby’s, has agreed to buy most of the assets of digital collectibles platform Candy Digital.
He wrote on X that he’s “doubling down” on his “commitment to digital collectibles, adding that “when the transaction closes in a week or two, I will also serve as CEO.”
The acquisition comes at a pivotal moment for Candy Digital, which launched in 2021 amid heightened interest in NFTs and blockchain-based collectibles. Backed by investors including Michael Rubin, Mike Novogratz, and Gary Vaynerchuk, the platform quickly secured partnerships with major entertainment and sports entities, including Major League Baseball, DC Comics, and Netflix.
At its peak, Candy Digital reported around 1.5 million users. However, the NFT bubble burst in 2022, leading to operational changes, and the platform entered a maintenance phase in 2024, prompting speculation about its long-term viability. It’s therefore a bold move by Smith.
A 2023 report published by dappGambl, a blockchain and finance research community, revealed the extent of the NFT market’s collapse. After analyzing 73,257 collections, the team found that 95 percent, nearly 70,000, had a market value of zero Ether, meaning most NFTs today were essentially worthless. Once a $17 billion craze in 2021, these digital tokens now sit in the wallets of an estimated 23 million investors with little to no practical value.
Smith indicated that the acquisition is intended to build on the company’s existing infrastructure rather than replace it. In public remarks, he emphasized continuity for current users and licensors, alongside a renewed focus on user engagement and communication.
When ARTnews asked him for comment, he replied: “Nothing to say until the deal is closed.”
Candy Digital’s portfolio includes licensed digital collectibles tied to major sports organizations such as NASCAR and WWE, as well as digital editions of notable comic book properties. They include early issues featuring Superman and Batman through its agreement with DC Comics.
The deal signals continued institutional interest in digital collectibles despite the sustained contraction in NFT trading volumes since their 2021 peak. Smith previously oversaw Sotheby’s during its expansion into NFT sales, including high-profile auctions of digital artworks.
While leading Sotheby’s between 2015 and 2019, Smith oversaw efforts to modernize the company’s digital capabilities, including the 2018 purchase of Thread Genius, a firm specializing in image recognition and machine learning tools for artwork discovery. Beyond his current role, Smith serves as chairman of the supervisory board at the Fine Art Group and is a partner at 50T Holdings, a growth equity fund dedicated to investments in digital assets.
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Photograph by Antoine Yar, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
So uninterested was I in coming out of the closet at the dawn of the twenty-first century that the thought of spending freshman year on death row seemed more appealing. This was September 2000, during my first semester at Duke. I was anxious about sex and awkward around other boys I thought might be gay. I avoided the one out guy in my hall, instead spending many a late night interrogating the evangelicals who dominated our dormitory. They were friendly but fervent and unfunny, and they wore their heterosexuality as proudly as the chunky wooden crosses around their necks.
The death row project was the brainchild of a criminal defense attorney who was friends with my photography professor. The attorney, whom I’ll call Jack (like most people in this piece, that was not his real name), was looking for students to travel around the state taking portraits of his clients’ families. The students would then venture to Central Prison in Raleigh to pass their work off to the inmates, all of whom were awaiting execution and rarely saw their parents, wives, or children. It takes a particularly inspired imagination to not only come up with a project like this but to trust that three college freshmen, of all people, could be the ones to lead it. Jack had a sardonic twinkle and hid his compassion under a rumpled blazer, which, the first time I met him, sported a mustard stain. I signed up right away.
Jack’s firm represented a dozen capital offenders, and he hoped we’d each work with one. When we met in his office, he gave us a list of each man’s name and ID number and explained in vivid detail the crimes they’d been convicted of committing. One man stabbed a teenage girl sixty-four times for no apparent reason (“I’d skip him,” Jack suggested). “So,” he said after he finished describing the twelfth man’s felonies, “who y’all wanna see?”
Over the next three months, I met a handful of inmates, developed a rapport with a couple of them, and carefully avoided others. One wrote us nice letters in between visits. Another sent a girl on our team a death threat on which he signed another man’s name, only to learn that the inmate he was trying to frame was illiterate. Frank, whom I visited most often, liked race cars and football. He had a gentle, almost childlike demeanor, the result of some form of intellectual disability.
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