Between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 the NFTs market – that property certificate of a digital asset saved on blockchain – reached its peak, engulfing investors in a real collective “fear of missing out” that, riding the wave of enthusiasm for the possibility of artificially creating unique pieces, had quickly led to the famous speculative bubble.
Astonishing figures have made history, such as the iconic Everydays: The First 5000 Days by Beeple, sold for a staggering $69 million, or CryptoPunk #5822, passed by hand for 23 million. Two years later, collective hysteria seems to have left room to a quiet requiem: in 2023, the specialised portal CryptoSlam reported a 92% drop in the volume of non-fungible token, with an average price down 84% and a 47% drop in the number of buyers.
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This downfall deserves to be contextualised in the particular context of the post-pandemic economy, which has seen the cryptocurrency sector fall, in one year, by 70% (the same applies for shares related to Silicon Valley giants).
The result is that, as the headlines of several specialised newspapers thunder, NFTs are worth nothing: and, as a matter of fact, last September the cryptocurrencies site dappGambl, based on data from NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap, announced that 95% of the more than 73,000 collections of non-fungible tokens has no value (leaving in fact 23 million collectors with empty hands).
The same trend can be observed in different sectors of which NFTs are an integral part, such as blockchain-based "metaverse", which after the boom of recent years sees the number of users go into a slump. It is the case of the "virtual world" of Decentraland, a digital space whose economy initially generated 1.3 billion dollars, causing general sensation, but which today has gone from 300 thousand to 57 thousand monthly users. The same goes for The Sandbox, its main competitor, which has lost about a third of its users in the last year. In short, there’s no one in the metaverse anymore.
It is likely that, with the loss of ‘occasional’ buyers, the NFTs market will finally stabilise in a niche of few loyal investors.
However, there is a window of opportunity: the phenomenon of memes tokens, cryptocurrencies that base their value on the virality of memes distributed in online communities (which follow an extremely variable trend, bound to the temporary popularity of the meme).
In 2024, the institutionalisation of meme coins has significantly increased their popularity, leading them to establish themselves as a significant part of the cryptocurrency market, despite the very high risk associated with rapid and unpredictable price movements.
So what is the future (if there will be a future) of NFTs? To answer this question it is necessary to consider, in first place, that the burst of the bubble does not mean the end of what, in the end, is nothing more than a tool to attribute uniqueness to a digital piece.
What is currently in prospect, therefore, is not a worthy burial of the NFTs, but rather a change in the target of investors: it is likely that, with the loss of “occasional” buyers, the NFTs market will finally stabilise in a niche of few loyal investors.
Opening image: The Sandbox. Courtesy The Sandbox