From boom to bust
NFTs at their peak in 2022 were a multi-billion dollar market. Since then, most of the famous projects have lost value, changed course, or simply disappeared. With hindsight, many predictions from that period look very optimistic. Some were close to fantasy.
Big names, bad guesses
Kevin O’Leary said insurance, tax, and real estate transactions would become NFTs. Mark Cuban expected Mavericks tickets to turn into NFTs with royalties. Neither happened. Michael Wagner of Star Atlas thought his game could bring in billions of users. Star Atlas stopped tracking SAGE: Starbased at around 2,000 monthly active users.
Mike Novogratz predicted healthcare records and fashion brands would all use NFTs. They do not. Jefferies analyst Stephanie Wissink saw NFT market cap passing $80 billion by 2025. CoinGecko puts it near $1.7 billion now. Aleksander Larsen of Sky Mavis said blockchain games would create GDP “in a way we have never even thought about.” Axie Infinity later became known for funding North Korean hackers in part. MetaKovan paid $69 million for Beeple’s Everydays and said it was worth $1 billion. He has not resold it, and it seems unlikely to fetch that figure now.
Reese Witherspoon said everyone would have a parallel digital identity. Brian Armstrong thought Coinbase’s NFT platform could be as big as crypto trading. It was shut down. Tyler Winklevoss and Nifty Gateway’s founder saw a major role for NFTs in digital commerce, but Nifty Gateway is gone. Justin Sun called his NFT fund the prologue to a spectacular chapter in art history. His platform had around $6 in daily trading volume when Protos checked.
Corporate enthusiasm faded fast
Mark Zuckerberg added NFTs to Instagram and later removed them. Nike bought RTFKT in 2021 and later sold it. Disney’s Bob Chapek called the metaverse the next storytelling frontier. His successor Bob Iger shut that work down. Tom Brady’s Autograph moved away from NFTs. Universal Music made a band out of Bored Apes, but it never released music. Square Enix’s president called 2021 “NFTs: Year One.” He later stepped down.
Snoop Dogg’s Death Row did not become an NFT label. Paris Hilton called the metaverse the future of partying and being social. Animoca’s Yat Siu talked about a digital ownership economy worth trillions. TIME abandoned its NFT gallery. EA’s Andrew Wilson said NFTs were the future of the industry, then EA stopped making them. Logan Paul’s CryptoZoo never launched and was exposed by Coffeezilla.
Not everyone missed
A few calls were less wrong. Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz said he could turn a failing project into a known brand. The penguins now have toys in major stores and a higher rank in NFT collections. That is a modest outcome compared with the trillion-dollar talk. Most of the other predictions, however, have aged poorly. The NFT boom was real, but the imagined future never arrived.
