This is a chart of NFT trading volume in the past ~4 years. It looks like the price chart of your favorite shitcoin.

What happened? I'll go through a few of the general narratives and assumptions.

1. NFTs were a fad

NFTs are tokens that represent unique items. There are NFTs for bunch of different things: digital art, tokenized physical art, game assets, avatars or PFPs, Uniswap liquidity positions, ETH validators, concert tickets; to name a few. Going through the value props of each of these is for a much longer post, but it's nonsensical to dismiss such a wide category as a fad, especially when its older sibling (fungible) tokens is starting to find pockets of product-market-fit. In fact, if we were to look at the same chart for number of users (nay, wallets, but still), things look different.

Number of users is still down quite a bit, but it's not flatlining. To me the main takeaway from this delta between # of users and trading volume is that NFTs still have some PMF, even if just for speculation, and that the prior trading volume inflation was an artificial inflation due to broader macro crypto dynamics. People spent an obscene amount of USD to purchase NFTs because to them they were spending a not-so-obscene amount of ETH or SOL or BTC; it's just that the crypto had become obscenely more valuable.

2. NFTs moved out of Ethereum

If all you remember about chain adoption for NFTs is a chart like this from 2024, you would be right in assuming Ethereum is irrelevant now. However the world is looking slightly different in 2025.

Solana, and to some extent Bitcoin, have indeed managed to get sticky NFT adoption, but the Ethereum ecosystem has caught back up and surpassed. To me this isn't too surprising because we've seen this type of competitive catchup from the Ethereum ecosystem in many other lanes of crypto, including DeFi and memecoins.

3. NFTs will remain speculative

To me NFTs are starting their post-ICO era. Here's a lazy comparison:

Era	Tokens	NFTs
Birth	Colored coins	Rare Pepes, Cryptopunks
Infancy	Maker, 0x, Augur, Golem	Cryptokitties, Axie Infinity, Decentraland, SuperRare
Capital Formation	ICOs: Filecoin, Tezos, Chainlink, Bancor, BNB	BAYC, PudgyPenguins, Art Blocks, Sandbox, Loot, NounsDAO, POAPs
PMF Centric (post-ICO)	Stablecoins, UNI, STETH, alt-L1s	??
Adoption Centric	HYPE, Memecoins, TON, Worldcoin	??

Each era has its winners and losers, and later eras aren't better than or replacing older ones. The same way Maker is still around, Cryptopunks is. So I'm really curious to see which of the earlier NFT projects will still be around in the years to come, and more importantly which new types of NFTs will find PMF and adoption in this new era.

I've been super excited about NFTs ever since Cryptopunks and Cryptokitties came out. If people were willing to play Cryptokitties in 2018 when UX and fees sucked, then there was a unique value prop. The right teams will find much more pleasurable experiences in 2025, where UX and fees are at least 10x better. These teams just need to focus on the long term.