They have no intrinsic value, but they’re worth what people will pay for them I guess. The only problem is that entire thing was a hype bubble conjured up scammers. The insane thing is that for a brief moment they even had famous auction houses buying into the scam.
No one will convince me that there isn’t money laundering going on there. There’s just no way an actual person looked at that and thought it is worth that kind of money
Well, no piece of art has an intrinsic value. And auction houses exist to make money, not because of some divine purpose to connect true art to its worthy new owner. Of course they’re going to jump on the hype train if they think it’s worth it. I fully agree that NFTs are a scam, like almost all crypto crap. But so is the current art market. Money laundering and investments for the rich.
A better question would be, did anyone ever even buy them to begin with?
This means that 79% of all NFT collections – otherwise known as almost 4 out of every 5 – have remained unsold.
That is, most of the NFTs included in the OP statistic were listed for sale by their creators, and never recorded a sale. Another important detail is that even for the ones that did record sales, there’s no real way of knowing if those sales were real. You can easily make another crypto wallet and buy an NFT from yourself. For more elaborate wash trading, you can find someone with an established wallet to collude with. There are obvious reasons to do this too; building up a history of increasing sale prices could potentially dupe someone into thinking an NFT is a good investment, or you could launder money by selling an NFT to a ‘dirty’ wallet you also control.
Probably some portion of the market was “real”, but the volume is almost certainly much lower than anyone is reporting. Statistics like what the OP article is quoting are just about totally meaningless.
Hundreds of millions collectively, when people were dumb enough to buy them. The problem is that eventually dumb people ran out of money and the worth plummeted to zero.
Were they worth anything to begin with?
They have no intrinsic value, but they’re worth what people will pay for them I guess. The only problem is that entire thing was a hype bubble conjured up scammers. The insane thing is that for a brief moment they even had famous auction houses buying into the scam.
https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-6316969?ldp_breadcrumb=back&intObjectID=6316969&from=salessummary&lid=1
That shitty set of randomized pixel art sold for more than anything else in that particular show, aside from a Basquiat.
No one will convince me that there isn’t money laundering going on there. There’s just no way an actual person looked at that and thought it is worth that kind of money
Well, no piece of art has an intrinsic value. And auction houses exist to make money, not because of some divine purpose to connect true art to its worthy new owner. Of course they’re going to jump on the hype train if they think it’s worth it. I fully agree that NFTs are a scam, like almost all crypto crap. But so is the current art market. Money laundering and investments for the rich.
A better question would be, did anyone ever even buy them to begin with?
That is, most of the NFTs included in the OP statistic were listed for sale by their creators, and never recorded a sale. Another important detail is that even for the ones that did record sales, there’s no real way of knowing if those sales were real. You can easily make another crypto wallet and buy an NFT from yourself. For more elaborate wash trading, you can find someone with an established wallet to collude with. There are obvious reasons to do this too; building up a history of increasing sale prices could potentially dupe someone into thinking an NFT is a good investment, or you could launder money by selling an NFT to a ‘dirty’ wallet you also control.
Probably some portion of the market was “real”, but the volume is almost certainly much lower than anyone is reporting. Statistics like what the OP article is quoting are just about totally meaningless.
Hundreds of millions collectively, when people were dumb enough to buy them. The problem is that eventually dumb people ran out of money and the worth plummeted to zero.