The future of NFTs

In 2021, NFTs were everywhere. A few years later, many people ask if they still exist at all. The answer is yes, but the market no longer looks like the one that made the headlines. To understand where NFTs could go, we first need to look at what happened after the boom.

From boom to crash (2022 to 2023)

Trading reached its peak at the start of 2022. Then prices fell quickly. In May 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that daily NFT sales had dropped by 92% since their peak of September 2021. Several causes came together:

• The wider crypto crash: rising interest rates, the collapse of Terra Luna in May 2022 and the bankruptcy of FTX in November 2022 pushed many investors out of the market.
• Speculation: many buyers were only looking for a quick profit. When prices stopped rising, demand disappeared.
• Too many projects: thousands of similar collections were created, most without any real plan. In September 2023, a study by dappGambl estimated that about 95% of NFT collections were worth nothing.
• Fraud and manipulation: scams, "rug pulls", stolen artworks and wash trading damaged the reputation of the whole sector.

Famous sales also lost their value. Jack Dorsey's first tweet, bought for $2.9 million in 2021, was put back on sale in 2022 and received a best offer of a few hundred dollars.

What changed in the technology

While prices were falling, the technology kept improving:

• Ethereum's energy use: in September 2022, "The Merge" moved Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake and cut its energy consumption by more than 99.9%. One of the strongest criticisms of NFTs, their environmental impact, mostly went away.
• Cheaper networks: Layer 2 networks such as Base, Arbitrum and Optimism, and blockchains such as Solana, Polygon and Tezos, now let people mint and trade NFTs for a fraction of a cent. Solana's compressed NFTs made it possible to issue millions of tokens at a very low cost.
• NFTs on Bitcoin: in January 2023, Casey Rodarmor launched Ordinals, a way to write images and text directly into individual satoshis. Bitcoin, where it all began with Colored Coins, became an NFT network again.
• Smarter tokens: new standards let NFTs own other assets (ERC-6551), be rented for a limited time (ERC-4907) or be linked to physical objects.

Where the market stands today

The NFT market is now smaller, calmer and more mature. Trading volumes are far below their 2021 peak, but a core of collectors, artists and builders stayed. The blue chip collections, such as CryptoPunks, Art Blocks or Pudgy Penguins, kept an active community, and generative and on-chain art kept a loyal audience.

The traditional art world stayed cautious. Christie's scaled back its digital art department in 2024, but auction houses still sell major NFT works, and museums such as the Centre Pompidou, LACMA and MoMA have added them to their collections. At the same time, several big brand projects closed, such as Starbucks Odyssey and Nike's RTFKT, a sign that NFTs alone are not enough to keep an audience.

The regulatory pressure also eased in the United States: in 2025, the SEC closed its investigation into OpenSea without taking action, which removed some of the uncertainty about whether NFTs should be treated as securities.

The trends that shape the future

The industry now talks less about quick profits and more about utility. Here are the directions that look the most promising:

• Digital art and culture: NFTs remain the best tool to prove the authenticity and history of a digital work. Generative art, photography and AI-assisted art keep finding collectors.
• Games: studios now use NFTs in a lighter way, as optional items that players can really own and trade, instead of "play to earn" economies.
• Tickets, memberships and loyalty: a token in a wallet can replace a paper ticket, a membership card or a loyalty stamp, and give its owner access to future benefits.
• Identity and credentials: domain names like ENS, diplomas, certificates and non-transferable "soulbound" tokens could prove who we are and what we have done.
• Real-world assets: property titles, luxury goods, invoices or shares in funds can be represented by tokens, making them easier to verify and to transfer.
• Invisible NFTs: the most successful projects often hide the technology. Users collect an avatar, a badge or a ticket without knowing that it is an NFT. Mainstream adoption will probably look like this.

The questions that remain

Some problems still need solutions before NFTs can reach a larger public:

• Legal rights: buyers need clear licences that say what they can do with the work they own.
• Durability: files stored on normal servers can disappear. On-chain storage, IPFS and Arweave are safer, but not always used.
• Royalties: artists want to be paid on resales, while marketplaces compete on low fees.
• Trust and security: scams and phishing remain a serious risk. Simpler wallets and better education are essential.
• Regulation: laws on digital assets, such as MiCA in Europe, are still evolving and will shape what projects can offer.

Conclusion

The speculative bubble of 2021 is over, and that is probably a good thing. What remains is a technology that solves a real problem: proving who owns something digital, and letting that ownership move freely. The future of NFTs will depend less on record prices and more on the artists, communities and useful services that choose to build with them.

Want to explore further? Browse our selection of NFT websites and discover the NFT collections we create and follow.