NFTs: the great rush may be over – but are they in actual decline?
It was described as the Mona Lisa of the digital world and it came with a connoisseur’s price tag: $2.9m (£2.4m) for the first tweet by Twitter’s co-founder. This was March 2021 and non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, were bursting into the mainstream.
One year on, an attempt to sell on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter debut for $25m was pulled after auction bids topped out at just $14,000 (£11,350). Explosive growth of NFTs over the past 12 months has levelled off, and may even be in decline, according to analysis of the sector, as attention consolidates around a few of the largest players.
The NFT rush in 2021 saw sale after sale of the novel digital assets hit staggering sums. A collection of images by the visual artist Beeple sold for $69m, the main token for the “play to earn” video game Axie Infinity hit a total value of $9.75bn and Coca-Cola raised more than $575,000 from selling items such as a customised jacket to be worn in the metaverse. The football industry, with former Chelsea star John Terry to the fore, has not been slow to back the craze either.
The Dorsey NFT was put up for auction in April by its owner, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sina Estavi, who said: “This NFT is not just a tweet, this is the Mona Lisa of the digital world.” Estavi hoped to raise more than $25m from the sale and offered to donate half his takings to charity. When bids reached just $14,000, he pulled the auction entirely.
Non-fungible tokens are so-called because, unlike similar technologies such as bitcoin and ethereum, each is in some way unique. That means that they can be applied to more than just simple currency-style uses, and in the past few years NFTs have been adopted by people seeking to turn art, music, games and trading cards into digital
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