NFT’s were supposed to be the next thing. They were gone quicker than a meme

In December 2021, a digital record linked to a computer-generated picture of a robot samurai sold at auction for an amount of cryptocurrency then worth over $1.8 million.

These were the heady final months of the worldwide craze for “non-fungible tokens” — or NFTs to you and me. NFTs, on its most basic level, is the ownership of a digital piece of work, such as art or music. They could include memes or even actual pieces of art. Advocates promised that they would revolutionize art patronage while making millions of ordinary people filthy rich in a matter of months.

Sotheby’s and Christies sold NFTs for millions of dollars apiece. Jimmy Fallon hyped ‘Bored Apes’ on The Tonight Show. Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, Louis Vuitton, YouTube, and the University of California-Berkeley all got stuck in. Exactly what NFTs were, or how they worked, was often lost in the mania.

Yet within a year, the NFT market had dramatically collapsed, taking many people’s money and hopes with it. Estimated trading volumes dropped from $4 billion to around $800 million, and research suggests that 95 percent of NFTs are now worthless.

Today, the highest price anyone has offered for that $1.8 million robot samurai NFT in the past 12 months is just 0.0554 Ether, equivalent to $2,852 as of December 17.

Even after all that, however, some advocates insist that the underlying technology still has important uses, and dream that it may yet rise from the ashes.

So what the hell happened to NFTs? And could they ever make a comeback?

It started with good intentions

On March 11, 2021, the venerable British auction house Christies announced that it had sold its first ever NFT for a staggering $69 million.

The associated artwork was titled Everydays: the First 5000 Days, by the online artist known as Beeple (aka Michael Winkelmann). In theory, he was now one of the three most valuable living artists on Earth.

You’ll notice, though, that I didn’t say anything about Beeple actually selling an artwork. That’s because he didn’t. And this distinction is key to understanding why NFTs went so wrong.

For centuries, the art world has struggled to maintain reliable records of ownership in the face of war, disaster and forgery. And in May 2014, two men at a New York City hackathon — artist Kevin McCoy and tech entrepreneur Anil Dash — attempted to make their own modest contribution by harnessing a nascent digital technology called blockchains.

A blockchain is basically a way to create and maintain permanent transaction logs without relying on centralized institutions. Each new entry is verified by a network of computers that check each other’s work, wielding unbreakable encryption to resist tampering.

That’s how cryptocurrencies, such as Ether and Bitcoin, can operate without any input from banks or governments. It’s also how NFTs were meant to help verify art ownership.

“The idea behind NFTs was, and is, profound,” wrote Anil Dash in 2021. “Technology should be enabling artists to exercise control over their work, to more easily sell it, to more strongly protect against others appropriating it without permission.

The idea was to create a unique digital certificate of art ownership that could always be traced back all the way to its original creator. Selling these certificates could give digital artists a new way to fund their art, and collectors a new way to buy in.

Others quickly expanded the idea, coining the term “non-fungible token” in 2017 to distinguish these certificates from, say, a Bitcoin (which is interchangeable with any other Bitcoin).

But the new NFT industry — which Dash was not part of, and has repeatedly denounced — never solved some basic problems with the concept.

A tidal wave of scams, fraud, and cyber-theft

Who owns the Mona Lisa? Back in 2018, the blockchain start-up Verisart briefly listed the answer as a British coder named Terence Eden.

Eden’s stunt was simple and easy to fix. Still, it raised the question: how do you know that the original seller of an NFT was actually representing the real artist? Wouldn’t you need some kind of trusted institution to make and maintain that link?

As Eden pointed out at the time: “There’s no way to permanently attach a digital certificate to a physical work of art… it’s almost as if we can’t just throw technology at the social problem of trust.”

Another question: Does buying an NFT actually come with any rights over the artwork itself? If not, what is the buyer even getting? Also, who’s going to police fraud and impersonation? Who will protect consumers from account hacks, given that blockchain transactions (unlike bank transfers) are irreversible?

As money and enthusiasm began to pour into NFTs in the wake of Covid-19, major marketplaces largely just shrugged and fell back on “buyer beware.” Artist verification remained weak; many NFTs conferred no rights; and all too many NFT advocates chose relentless hype over caution.

Digital trading cards! Merchandise and collectibles! Rapidly rising art prices! You too could ride this rocket to the moon if only you get in right now!

The result was an unprecedented wave of scams, fraud and outright cyber-theft, affecting both artists and buyers. Many NFTs never even contained a copy of the artwork they were meant to be tied to. They just had hyperlinks, which often went dead within a year or two.

All too often, the art itself was also dire, replicating the modern “AI slop” aesthetic years or months before the release of ChatGPT.

“Nothing went the way it was supposed to,” wrote Dash in 2021, likening the whole affair to an exploitative “gold rush.”

Meanwhile, famed (and famously expensive) British conceptual artist Damien Hirst created NFTs for thousands of his paintings, then burned the originals. “I’m not burning my art,” he declared. “I’m transforming it into NFTs.”

The big losers of the NFT crash

In 2022, as predicted by so many critics, the NFT market began to crash.

In April, an NFT of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet — which had fetched $2.9 million the previous March — went on sale again, but the highest bid was $280. By July, daily NFT sales had plummeted by more than 90 percent.

Among the biggest losers were celebrities who had bought in late in the hype cycle. Justin Bieber’s ‘Bored Ape’ NFT cost around $1.3 millions in Ether; Eminem’s version cost just under $460,000. As of Dec. 17, 2025, the highest recent offer for either is around $2,800.

Then there’s Logan Paul, who promised that his forthcoming NFT-based video game CryptoZoo would let you earn money just by playing it. That never happened, leading to a class action lawsuit and Paul offering to partially refund customers.

Most victims were less famous. “I still hold the vast majority of [my NFTs] – I couldn’t sell most even if I wanted to,” collector Joseph Skewes told Vice News in 2023. “From the peak, the loss is upwards of $50,000.”

Another collector in Florida, who asked to be anonymous, said he’d come out of the first crash unscathed but then managed to lose up to $400,000 trying to recapture the magic afterwards.

Some of the biggest NFT “whales” — often crypto entrepreneurs — seem to be doing fine, as are those that merely rode the dragon while it was in flight.

“We were very much about getting in and getting out within 24 hours,” prolific NFT trader Collin Li told The Australian Financial Review in July.

In September, Christies admitted defeat and closed its digital art department. Bitcoin prices have rebounded since the crash of ’22, and Ether prices partially rebounded; NFTs never did.

As for Anil Dash, he never took a financial stake in NFTs, but the mess still follows him. “My son mockingly calls me ‘NFT guy’ because he knows it’s the most horrible epithet I could ever be saddled with,” he said on Bluesky in 2023:

The fall and rise of NFTs?

Even so, there are people who still carry a torch. Jane Rolls and G.T. Sewell of Melbourne, Australia, told the Review that they remain about $250,000 down, but continue to make and buy NFTs because they believe the long-term future is bright.

According to Fast Company, while many NFT companies perished, other firms continue to find ways to integrate NFTs, including Louis Vuitton and various video game developers. Disney’s official tie-in NFTs sell at respectable prices, as do the NBA’s.

Notably, many of the ongoing projects rely on the heft of a big institution to guarantee authenticity. That suggests NFTs can have their uses, as long as someone is actually policing them — although it’s a fair cry from the futuristic vision of “decentralized” digital items free from corporate control that some NFT boosters promised.

“I think everything’s working out the right way,” longtime NFT magnate Roham Gharegozlou told Fast Company. “There were speculative excesses within the industry, but I think that also was a stress test for everything to come.”