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Remember when NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, were all the hotness and were selling for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars?
If you purchased one of those NFTs, you do.
Because they are all but worthless now.
Of course, if you sold one or more of those NFTs while the iron was hot, like Overly Attached Girlfriend did for $400,000, then you too remember the inexplicable rush people were in to buy them.
It never really made sense.
For example, an Instagram influencer sold her “love” as an NFT for $250,000.
Someone else paid $24.4 million for 101 Bored Ape NFTs.
The Nelk Boys made millions when they sold out of all of their NFTs in less than 10 minutes.
Bill Gates, of all people, didn’t think they were worth anything, calling the stampede to buy them The Greater Fool Theory.
Fascinating to watch the older tech giants/investors fade out of relevance.
— Yet Another Crypto Analyst (@sck_trade) June 15, 2022
wow nice word salad bill, he clearly has no idea. and you norms eat it up
— Janitor (@koda5208) July 11, 2022
Why is he still relevant? He's out of touch with the present tech and no one cares what he thinks 😂😂
— M Prins (@Blitz_187) June 15, 2022
Turns out he was 100 percent right.
One guy, Geoffrey Huntley, right clicked and stole every NFT in existence and uploaded it to NFT Bay as a torrent, and it didn’t cost him a dime.
Now, in a year-end report, Chris Stokel-Walker of New Scientist write, “What went wrong? Primarily, there was a traditional boom and bust, for all that NFTs’ proponents want to claim that the underlying economics behind NFTs and crypto were immune to that.
“At the same time, NFTs were constantly plagued with worries that the majority of interest was confected through so-called ‘wash trading,’ where people buy from themselves to bump up prices. And increased regulatory interest – including from tax authorities – made investing in NFTs less attractive for lay traders.”
Another report published earlier this year by the website dappGambl, stated that 69,795 of the 73,257 NFT collections the researchers examined had a market cap of zero ether, which is good for a rate of just over 95%.
That’s quite a precipitous drop considering NFTs had nearly $2.8 billion in monthly trading volume recorded in August 2021.
By their estimate, over 23 million people now own a NFT investment that is now worthless.
In the immortal words of Bill Gates – the guy who was so out of touch, “Obviously expensive digital images of monkeys are going to improve the world immensely.”