Global Trends

What Happened to NFTs

On March 11, 2021, a South Carolina graphic designer named Mike Winkelmann sold a JPEG for $69.3 million at

By Conor Healy

March 30, 2026

On March 11, 2021, a South Carolina graphic designer named Mike Winkelmann sold a JPEG for $69.3 million at Christie’s. The piece, a collage of 5,000 digital drawings he had made, one per day, since 2007, was called Everydays: The First 5000 Days. The auction opened at $100. It closed with 33 bidders fighting over it in the final hour.

The world lost its mind.

Christie’s had just sold its first purely digital artwork. Winkelmann, who goes by Beeple and had previously been best known for designing concert visuals for Justin Bieber, was instantly ranked among the three most expensive living artists on the planet. And non-fungible tokens, the blockchain-based certificates that made the sale possible, exploded into mainstream conversation almost overnight.

Three years later, the same technology that generated $24.9 billion in total sales in 2021 had collapsed so thoroughly that art NFT trading volume sat at $23.8 million in early 2025. That is not a typo. A 93% wipeout. And the uncomfortable truth about what happened to NFTs is that if anyone had asked a few basic questions at the time, none of this should have been surprising.

You Didn’t Own What You Thought You Owned

The single most important thing to understand about what happened to NFTs is what an NFT actually was. Not the marketing version. The technical version.

When you bought an NFT, you did not buy the image. You bought a token on a blockchain that contained a link pointing to where the image was hosted. Often on a third-party server. One that could go offline. One that the original creator could shut down, migrate, or simply abandon. The Christie’s specialist who handled the Beeple sale described what the buyer actually received as “essentially a long string of numbers and letters” and “a gigantic JPEG.” That was the honest version. Most of the marketing was considerably less candid.

Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, “just setting up my twttr,” sold as an NFT in March 2021 for $2.9 million. The buyer, Iranian crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi, compared it to the Mona Lisa. One year later, he listed it for resale at $48 million. The auction closed with seven bids. The highest offer was $280. By 2023, the best offer on OpenSea sat at $3.77.

Dorsey’s tweet still lives on Twitter. Dorsey could have deleted it. He could have minted additional NFTs of the same tweet. None of that would have changed the token Estavi held. Because the token was never the tweet. It was a certificate pointing at a tweet, issued on a blockchain that cared nothing about what Twitter decided to do.

The Mania Had All the Usual Fingerprints

Bubbles tend to follow a script. There is a genuine innovation. Then there is discovery. Then there is capital pouring in faster than anyone can rationally assess value. Finally come the celebrities.

The NFT bubble ran this playbook with almost comedic precision.

By January 2022, Paris Hilton appeared on The Tonight Show to discuss her Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT with host Jimmy Fallon, who had purchased his own for roughly $216,000. The pair sat on screen and compared their cartoon apes to an audience that responded with what one writer memorably called “tepid applause.” Screenwriter Zach Kornfeld captured the general reaction: “A true culture is dead moment.”

That week was, according to Google Trends data, the exact peak of public interest in Bored Apes.

What viewers were not told: Fallon and Hilton had both invested in MoonPay, the platform they were promoting as a way to buy NFTs. A subsequent class-action lawsuit alleged that neither disclosed their financial interests, and that celebrity endorsements across the board, including from Justin Bieber, Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg, and Kevin Hart, were part of an orchestrated promotional scheme with Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Apes. Yuga Labs called the claims “opportunistic and parasitic.” The lawsuits proceeded.

Bill Gates, watching from a distance, called the entire phenomenon “100% based on greater fool theory.”

The Floor Prices Tell the Story

Bored Ape Yacht Club floor prices hit an all-time high of around $420,000 per NFT in April 2022. By May 2023, the floor had fallen to roughly $80,000. CryptoPunks saw their average floor price collapse from over $240,000 to just above $52,000 in the space of a few months in 2022.

Across the broader market, the average price of an NFT token sale fell 92% between May 2022 and February 2023, from $3,894 to $293, according to Chainalysis data.

The timing was not coincidental. Crypto winter arrived in 2022 with a ferocity that took even true believers by surprise. Bitcoin peaked near $70,000 in late 2021 and the total crypto market cap hit $3 trillion before collapsing. When the crypto market cratered, the speculative energy feeding NFT prices evaporated. Then the FTX collapse in November 2022 wiped out whatever confidence remained.

Trading volumes on OpenSea, the dominant NFT marketplace, had seen nine consecutive months above $2 billion between 2021 and 2022. By December 2023, that number was $170 million. The platform laid off 50% of its staff. Its investor Coatue Management marked down their stake by 90%.

The Sale That Was Always Strange

There is a subplot to the Beeple story that never got the attention it deserved at the time.

The buyer of Everydays was Vignesh Sundaresan, a Singapore-based programmer who operated under the pseudonym MetaKovan. He paid using cryptocurrency and immediately described the work as “the most valuable piece of art for this generation,” with a true worth of $1 billion.

What was less discussed: Sundaresan had also invested heavily in 20 other Beeple NFTs before the Christie’s sale, which he had bundled into a product called B20 tokens. Those tokens surged on the day the auction results were announced and subsequently collapsed. Both the buyer and seller had a documented financial interest in driving the auction price as high as possible.

Beeple himself, in March 2021, called NFTs “an irrational exuberance bubble.” He said this in the same month his JPEG sold for $69 million.

Hindsight Was Never Required

The frustrating thing about what happened to NFTs is that the structural problems were visible from the beginning, if you chose to look.

The market was almost entirely speculative from the start. A study analyzing 6.1 million NFT transactions from 2017 to April 2021 found that 75% of NFTs sold for under $15 and 85% of all transactions could be traced to just 10% of traders. The idea that this was a democratizing technology for artists was not supported by the data.

The ownership question was also never resolved. What did you actually own? Not the copyright. Not the underlying image. No enforceable right to the thing the token pointed at. What happened to NFTs when the company that minted them shut down? The token remained. The asset it pointed to often did not.

Post-pandemic economic conditions did the rest. As interest rates rose and disposable income tightened, the logic of spending six figures on a cartoon ape became harder to sustain. The fear of missing out, which had been a powerful engine during lockdown when people were flush with stimulus money and bored at home, quietly disappeared when life resumed.

What’s Left

The NFT market has not completely disappeared. It has retreated to something smaller and more defensible. Trading activity around gaming assets and blockchain-based collectibles continues in niche communities. A handful of blue-chip collections still transact, though at fractions of their peak values. Some artists still use the technology legitimately, as a way to establish provenance and sell digital work directly.

But the vision that NFTs would fundamentally transform art ownership, replace physical collectibles, and become a cornerstone of the digital economy? That did not survive contact with basic economic reality.

What happened to NFTs is not a mystery. It is a case study in how quickly a genuinely interesting technology can be captured by speculative energy, celebrity marketing, and the oldest financial force in existence: the hope that someone else will pay more for something than you did.

The Mona Lisa it was not.