Everyone Has Stopped Buying NFTs
The NFT market has dropped nearly 97%.
This article is more than 2 years old
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) debuted with much promise. Like cryptocurrency, these digital tokens offered the prospect of buying, selling, and trading assets, but NFTs set themselves apart by representing transferable digital ownership and rights to property. Despite gaining popularity in recent times, everyone has virtually stopped buying these digital tokens spelling trouble for the NFT market.
NFTs are still a new concept. Despite offering easy access to ownership of property rights, images, and even identities, it is still a market that gives value to something in a virtual capacity. Instead of being able to display a painting or show friends the original comic book concept art, collectors investing in these new tokens merely claim ownership, there is no physical return.
This may be a driving factor in the recent NFT market plunge. According to a recent report for The Byte, sales for NFTs dropped 97% in September. This is a huge loss for the market despite still pulling in some $466 million because sales were up to $19 billion back in January.
How could NFTs lose so much in less than a year? It is likely due to the ongoing economic hardship sweeping the country, and even nations across the globe, in the ongoing uncertainty of digital ownership. While the value of the U.S. dollar continues to drop, the worth of collector’s items and property is skyrocketing, but only for real-world items.
Collectors are selling off memorabilia and artwork. They are able to combat financial losses and the massive effects of inflation by selling their classic comic books, concept art, and other items. NFTs may afford fans and those seeking to do online business quick easy access to content, but they hold no value offline.
It is a difficult concept, but in truth, there are no resale shops for NFTs; parents can’t clothe their children in digital rights, and no one can eat an NFT — at least not a living organic human. If buyers aren’t looking to gain a digital code to earn access to an item, online sellers and traders cannot compete. It becomes more lucrative to get back to the old-fashioned sales of physical copies because collectors are always searching to hold a prized movie prop in their hands or marvel at a graded copy of a rare first-edition comic.
In addition, NFTs are not entirely secure. Numerous buyers have been defrauded by NFT scams, and they have even been stolen from owners. Cybercrime issues have plagued the market and caused more hurdles for its success.
Despite this, that doesn’t mean that NFTs will go the way of the dinosaur. All markets have ups and downs as the technological world has displayed through the cryptocurrency numbers. Popularity and buyer priorities are major factors in these kinds of sales, and interest may return in the future.
For now, virtually everyone has stopped buying NFTs and it’s costing the market billions of dollars. Selling these virtual tokens is proving difficult as the economy continues to circle around recession fears, and financial hardship grips more and more Americans. Current NFT holders are unlikely to find someone to buy their content, regardless of how much they wish to sell and so they will have to wait the situation out in order to see if the future of NFTs can withstand the test of time and the ever-changing interests of buyers.
