Are NFTs dead?

Ask whether NFTs are dead and you’ll get two confident, opposite answers, both citing real numbers. The reason is that the market split in half. One measure fell off a cliff. The other hit an all-time high. Which one you quote decides which answer you give.

The number that says yes

Money moving through NFTs has collapsed, and not gently.

A 95% drawdown isn’t a dip. Most collections launched during the peak are worth a rounding error of what they sold for, and a great many can’t be sold at all, because the problem isn’t a low price — it’s that there’s no buyer at any price. Illiquidity is the part people underestimate. A 90% loss you can exit is survivable. A 90% loss you can’t exit is a collection of pictures.

If you’re asking because you’re wondering whether to buy in and wait for a recovery, this is the number that matters, and it’s a no.

The number that says no

Now the other half. While dollar volume fell, the count of NFTs actually changing hands went the other way:

• Q2 2025: trading volume down 45% to $867 million, while sales rose 78% to 14.9 million
• Q3 2025: over 18.1 million NFTs sold, a record, generating $1.6 billion

Read those together and the picture resolves. More people are trading more NFTs than during the boom. They’re just paying far less for each one. Average prices fell so far that total dollars dropped even as unit activity climbed.

That’s not a market dying. It’s a market that stopped being expensive. Whether you call that death depends entirely on whether you owned anything before it happened.

So which parts died?

Splitting it honestly:

Dead. The flip trade. Buying a profile picture at mint and selling it to a greater fool weeks later was the dominant use of NFTs in 2021, and it’s gone, because the greater fools left. Also dead: the assumption that a Discord server, a roadmap and a Twitter following constitute a project. Thousands of those launched and essentially all of them are worthless.

Wounded but alive. Blue-chip collectibles. Liquidity concentrated into a small set of established names while the long tail went illiquid. These still trade, at a fraction of peak.

Growing. The boring applications. Ticketing, in-game items, credentials and authenticated goods — cases where the token does a job instead of being the product. None of it makes headlines, which is roughly the point.

“Are NFTs still a thing?” — the honest version

Yes, in the way that domain names are still a thing. Nobody writes articles about domain names any more. People still register millions of them, because they’re useful infrastructure rather than an investment story. NFTs are partway through that same transition: from a thing you buy hoping it goes up, to a thing that quietly does a job.

The word “NFT” itself is doing badly, though, and that’s worth saying. Enough people associate it with the 2021 losses that many projects using the technology now avoid the term entirely — they’ll say “digital collectible”, “membership pass” or nothing at all. If you’re watching for the word to come back, you may be watching the wrong signal.

What this means if you’re just arriving

If you came here to find out whether you missed the boat: you missed a boat, and it sank. That’s genuinely good news for learning, because the pressure to rush is gone.

A few things follow from the numbers above:

1. Don’t buy expecting a recovery. The 2021 conditions — near-zero rates, lockdown attention, novelty — aren’t reassembling.
2. Check sales, not floor prices. For any collection, look at what has sold in the last few months. Listings are free to create. Sales aren’t.
3. Learn the mechanism cheaply. Minting something yourself on a low-cost network costs a few cents and teaches more than any amount of reading.
4. Assume the scams got worse, not better. Falling prices thin out honest projects faster than dishonest ones. The attacks are the same and the targets are fewer.

If you want the concept itself rather than the market post-mortem, start with what an NFT is. If you want the wreckage in detail, the most expensive NFTs ever sold and what happened to them afterwards makes the point faster than any chart.