It’s been just a few months since the non-fungible token (NFTs) market truly exploded, but some are already questioning its staying power. Prices for the blockchain-backed digital assets, Bloomberg reports, have fallen almost 70% from their February peak.
The drop was tracked by the website NonFungible.com, which monitors market trends and valuations across different NFT platforms. On February 22, the average price of an NFT collectible was around $4,300; by April 4, it had dropped to about $1,400.
But other data, Bloomberg notes, suggests NFTs may still be a smart investment. The market value of 38 NFTs tracked by CoinMarketCap grew more than eightfold to $22.5 billion over the first quarter of 2021, for example.
NFT market confidence has been likely boosted by headline-grabbing sales, led by a collection of 5,000 JPEGs by Beeple that fetched an astronomical $69 million at a Christie’s auction on March 11.
Meanwhile, David Hockney, the world’s most expensive living artist, recently spurned NFTs as “silly little things.”
“Things can get lost in the computer, can’t they?” said the 83-year-old painter on an episode of the art podcast Waldy and Bendy’s Adventures in Art. “And they will be, in the future, lost in the computer, even when the cloud gets going. There’s going to be so much on it, how will you find it?”
Great questions, David.
