Though hardly a shocker, dappGambl’s ‘Dead NFTs: The Evolving Landscape of the NFT Market’ report at the very least told us what we already kind of knew: 95% of all non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in existence are now essentially worthless.
dappGambl’s analysts covered over 73,000 NFT collections to conclude that “95% of people holding NFT collections are currently holding onto worthless investments”.
Specifically, of the 73,257 NFT collections studied, 69,795 of them had a market capitalisation of zero ether, the cryptocurrency typically used to denominate NFT prices.
Since the NFT hype train of mid-to-late 2021, volumes have dropped 97%, with not nearly enough demand to keep up with supply.
Four out of five NFT collections have remained unsold.
In fairness, these unsold pieces of digital art still command a massive price in another sense. The 195,000-plus NFT collections without any apparent owner or market share consumed approximately 16,243 metric tons of carbon dioxide during the mining process - equivalent to the yearly emissions of 2,048 homes or 3,531 cars.
Top-tier NFT collections have seen their floor prices fall precipitously. Bored Ape Yacht Club, for instance, has a floor price over 84% below its all-time high in April 2022.
Beeple weighs in
Artist Beeple (aka Mike Winkelmann), who broke records with the $69 million sale of his NFT work ‘Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ in March 2021, weighed in on his thoughts in typically eclectic fashion.
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN pic.twitter.com/s6Vp9j7m4K
— beeple (@beeple) September 21, 2023
The sale of Beeple Everydays through auction house Christies was akin to ground zero for the NFT craze that swept Redditt subchannels and celebrity-backed pyramid schemes in the months and years following.
On Thursday, Beeple posted a digital representation of a man holding a newspaper emblazoned with Rolling Stone’s headline on the matter.
With this post, Beeple was referencing the Chicago Daily Tribune’s infamously erroneous ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline from 1948.
Beeple, it seems, believes there is life in NFTs still, though he may be in the minority.