NFTs Are Now Almost Worth Nothing
ColdFusion · 2026-04-20 · 19 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIIWyoy4aF8Video summary
NFT trading surged to $17.6 billion in 2021, then collapsed as wash trading, celebrity hype, and speculation unraveled.
In 2021, NFTs went from a niche technology to a $17.6 billion market: Christie's sold Beeple’s digital artwork for $69.3 million, and Jack Dorsey’s first tweet fetched $2.9 million. NFTs were blockchain records of ownership, initially intended to help artists control and earn from digital work. Celebrity endorsements, Bored Ape Yacht Club status, and brand launches fueled the frenzy, while wash trading inflated reported activity; at LooksRare, it accounted for roughly 95% of volume. The crash followed: by May 2022, daily sales were down 92%, and the market’s major collections lost most of their value. Christie's closed its digital art department, Nifty Gateway shut down, and Nike faced a lawsuit over RTFKT. The video argues that speculation—not the underlying technology—drove the collapse, while real-world asset tokenization topped $30 billion by Q3 2025. NFTs may still have uses, but their mainstream future remains uncertain.
Chapters
- 0:00The NFT bubble explained: Beeple’s $69.3 million JPEG and $17.6 billion in 2021 trading
- 2:56Origins of NFTs: Nyan Cat’s $600,000 sale and Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash’s 2014 idea
- 4:49Sponsor: boot.dev
- 6:16The hype machine: Tyler Hobbs’s $9 million royalties and Paris Hilton’s Bored Ape promotion
- 8:25Commercialization: Bored Ape’s 10,000-token club and Nike’s RTFKT acquisition
- 10:12Market manipulation: LooksRare’s $18 billion in wash trading and the Mona Lisa ownership stunt
- 12:43The catastrophic collapse: NFT sales down 92%, Bieber’s Ape at $12,000, and platform exits
- 15:08Lessons and the future: $30 billion in tokenized assets, lingering NFTs, and an LLM bubble question
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