A few years ago it seemed that NFTs were a revolutionary way of owning unique pieces of digital content - music, art, videos. The peak of the NFT boom was August 2021 when trading volumes soared to nearly $3 billion per month. A few months earlier, a digital work titled “Everydays - the First 5000 Days” by American artist Beeple sold at Christies for USD69.3 million making it the most expensive NFT. There are suggestions that today the work is worth around $100, so what happened and what exactly are NFTs?

*Everydays; The First 5000 Days* Beeple (BBC)

NFT stands for non fungible token and it allows you to own a digitally created work of art, but you don’t have control over the copyright and distribution rights of the image. You can “own” an image but you can’t stop people reproducing it. In effect, you get a gold token or certificate and that means all you really own is a code, and bragging rights. I’ve heard NFTs being described as theoretical ownership.

The price of digital artworks is often based on their perceived future value. At the time of the auction of “Everydays..” art historians Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor were less than impressed, asking a very pertinent question. What happens to these digital artworks, many of which are Jpegs, when the technology supporting them is superceded? And for how long will we continue to view the world through a computer screen before new technology sweeps all that away?

So what of “Everydays….”? The work itself was produced over a 14 year period by Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann) and consists of 5000 digital images collaged together to create an enormous image. Each individual image took one day to produce. The technology behind NFTs is similar to that used in cryptocurrency.

And then, wouldn’t you know it? The bubble burst. In September 2025, Christies announced that it was closing its digital arts department. In 2024, Sotherbys laid off most of its Metaverse and NFT team amid a general contraction in the art market. The trading volume of art NFTs fell from a high of $2.97 billion in 2021 to just $197 million in 2024.

A report published in 2024 by NFTevening said that the market for NFTs has been in such a dramatic downturn since 2023 that 95 percent of them are considered “dead,” with the average NFT owner experiencing a 44.5 percent loss on their investment. Oh dear.

Perhaps there is no real substitute for a physical piece of artwork that you can actually wrap your arms around?

References;

Artnet.com

Artnews.com

Waldy & Bendy’s Adventures In Art - Podcast

Death of NFTs?