Opinion: The NFT Market Is Dying, but Are We Really That Surprised?
News has come about that the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace has experienced a huge lapse in trading. So much, in fact, that it’s down roughly 97 percent from its all-time high recorded in January of this year. That means in just under ten months, the world of non-fungible tokens has practically become non-existent.
The NFT Space Is Burning
This cannot simply be attributed to the general collapse of the crypto market. It’s one thing to say BTC and ETH are suffering, for example. These are mainstream coins that have proven their worth over time not only as investing tools, but as currencies given the high rates of adoption they’ve been witnessing as of late.
In virtually every sense, while these assets are certainly wading through the doldrums, it can be argued that their days of glory will come back, and these assets are likely to return to form.
But for the NFT space, things are quite different. NFTs, as we all know, are quite new, emerging as recently as the early days of 2020. This would mean even the oldest NFT token is not even three years of age, and the idea that so much inactivity has become commonplace in such a short window of time tells traders that NFTs were nothing more than a fad – speculative assets that have lost their values and no longer attract hardcore investors.
It’s sad, no doubt, but is it all that surprising? Seriously… Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on pixelated monkeys and the like? What were people thinking? That’s the first question we should probably ask, a second one being, “Don’t people have better things to waste so much money on?”
The idea that shoddy art – which could have easily been established by any child with a laptop – could attract such high bids to the table is (and this is putting things politely) a little embarrassing. Heck, even top-of-the-line crypto heads like Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin advised against NFT investing!
What Was the Big Deal, Anyway?
One could argue the NFT space serves as absolute proof that crypto players don’t always know what to do with their money. They get too involved in hype. Something new comes along and they almost instantly become convinced it’s worth something. Only too late do they realize the opposite is true. That whatever they bought is worth nothing or was purchased on a mass scale too quickly, thus reducing whatever value it may have had early on.
With so much from the NFT fray now missing, it makes sense it would be the first arena to dissipate as it has now that the digital currency space has gone under. With crypto experiencing its most bearish conditions yet, it’s likely crypto investors are not only being more stringent about the money they were throwing away on speculative items, but they’ve come to realize what bears legitimacy and what doesn’t. If that’s indeed the case, it’s possible NFTs will never enjoy a comeback… Even after the market rebounds.
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