Someone please tell the Bored Ape Yacht Club that NFTs are dead, because no one is listening.
Most of these top Bored Ape NFTs – digital art that people either use to make art galleries or pin up to their wall in a frame in their NYC penthouse – still go for over $120,000. For some reason, Bored Ape #6588 just sold for $1.17 million.
Indeed, even as headlines herald the NFT implosion of 2022, such obituaries ignore what’s really going on. The NFT craze isn’t going to turn out teenage millionaires every day anymore. With little hype left, investors will have to focus on real-world applications of NFTs, if they can find them.
Despite the weak digital assets market, the average price people paid for an NFT is up 2.5% to $371. Buyers are down 10.3%. Sellers looking to offload are down 16%. Overall sales are down around 10% to $10 million and change, according to the Non-Fungible Market Tracker.
People are struggling to sell their big-ticket NFTs. The Malaysian businessman who bought an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for $2.5 million last year struggled to get bids of more than a few hundred dollars when he tried to resell it in April this year. Maybe buyers realized that JPEGs aren’t worth millions of dollars.
That doesn’t mean NFTs are dying, as many of them are needed for games or special club memberships, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. For investors in NFT platforms or the digital art itself, it means the speculative frenzy is over.
“The hype around JPG NFTs and their over-night millionaire stories helped to make people get familiar with the emerging Web3,” thinks Theresia Le Battistini, CEO & Founder of Fashion League, a game for would-be fashionistas who are ready to give blockchains a shot. “No matter the market situation, NFTs are the most interesting improvement in blockchain technology. NFTs are more than just images,” she says, calling them “unique digital assets” that often have a use case. “It could be for ticketing, shopping or gaming apps…NFTs will be present and will be the driver for Web3 mass market adoption, I think,” she says.
Oren Langberg CMO at MonkeyLeague, another blockchain game that uses in-game characters you can buy and sell, says that after the dust settles on the NFT bubble, “we will see, and are already seeing, NFTs with more actual utility and those are the ones that will survive the market volatility.”
Time for a commercial break. What is an NFT anyway?
NFT stands for non-fungible token. It’s generally built using the same kind of programming as cryptocurrency. An NFT is a digital asset that is almost always artwork (like Bored Monkey), but can be music, videos and items for use in games – things like magic swords or…
Read More: www.forbes.com