Whatever happened to NFTs?

A few years back, my chairman was a big enthusiast of NFTs (nonfungible tokens). In one conversation I recall, I pointed to a picture of the founding chair of the department and suggested he could digitize it and sell it to alumni as an NFT. He said he thought that was a good idea. When I laughed, he said "I'm not joking." I replied: "That's what I'm afraid of."

NFTs have always been an example of The Greater Fool Theory of investing, which holds that investors can achieve positive returns by buying an asset without concern for valuation fundamentals and other important factors because someone else will buy it at a higher price. In the case of the NFT boom, many of the transactions were carried out using cryptocurrency (bitcoin, dogecoin, etherium), itself a bit of a scam.

Peak NFT was in August 2021. What happened since then?

"Of the 73,257 NFT collections we identified, an eye-watering 69,795 of them have a market cap of 0 Ether (ETH).

"This statistic effectively means that 95% of people holding NFT collections are currently holding onto worthless investments. Having looked into those figures, we would estimate that 95% to include over 23 million people who’s investments are now worthless."

A fool and his money, etc. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

https://dappgambl.com/nfts/dead-nfts/