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The Sad Truth About NFTs
Many NFT projects are all about hype, profit, social status, and the illusion of luxury. What you pay for is essentially a fancy JPEG, and that’s about it. I mean, who needs a real car or house when you can flex a JPEG, right?
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) by Yuga Labs is one of the most popular NFT projects in history, with its 10,000 unique cartoon apes selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Next thing you know, celebrities like Eminem, Jimmy Fallon, Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Stephen Curry started buying. As a consequence, the demand for BAYC increased.
However, as the market matured, demand for the entire market declined, including BAYC. Bored Apes went from selling at $300,000 to $50,000 in 2023. People realized there’s not much you can do about it beyond using them as profile pictures like on Twitter.
More recently, Azuki, a collection of 10,000 anime-like avatars, lost 50% of its value after a creative decision that was met with backlash from the community. The decision involved releasing a new collection of avatars called “Elementals” which was largely indistinguishable from the original “OG” collection. People started questioning the true value of the NFTs.
