Token no fungibles (NFTs ) Updated with current context

For decades, digital art faced a fundamental problem: anything digital can be copied infinitely, with no original and no scarcity. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) offered a technical solution — using blockchain to verify that a specific digital file was the "original," owned by a specific person, even if copies of it existed everywhere online.

Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, is an American digital artist whose work became closely associated with the NFT boom. He works across short films, VJ loops, and AR/VR art, but his most famous creation is EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, one of the most significant NFT artworks in digital art history.

BOOM — Digital art becomes economically valuable

In March 2021, Christie's sold Beeple's Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3 million, making it the first purely digital NFT-based artwork offered by a major auction house — a landmark moment that seemed to solve the historical problem of digital art: how can something infinitely reproducible acquire scarcity and market value?

Main objectives of NFTs

NFTs aimed to establish digital authenticity and ownership, allowing unique digital assets to be verified and owned through blockchain technology. They also created a way to assign value to digital content — art, music, videos, collectibles — based on uniqueness and exclusivity, while contributing to a digital economy where creators could monetize their work and collectors or investors could buy, sell, and trade digital assets.

Main objectives of NFTs

Their main purposes were:

Authenticity and uniqueness: verifying that a digital asset is unique and identifiable.
Digital ownership: enabling users to own, display, and trade digital assets.
Digital markets: creating decentralized spaces for collecting and exchanging digital assets.

The NFT narrative was built around three ideas — exclusivity, authenticity, and collecting — and it reshaped how digital content was perceived, owned, valued, and commercialized, drawing in collectors, investors, artists, technology enthusiasts, and brands alike.

Even major consumer brands joined in: Taco Bell launched a series of NFT taco artworks, donating all profits to the Taco Bell Foundation, and Louis Vuitton created Louis The Game, an NFT-linked mobile game inspired by its founder's life, where players explore cities connected to the brand while collecting "200 Anecdote" candles for its 200th anniversary.

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COLLAPSE — When financial value disappeared

The NFT boom was not simply a story of technological progress — it was also a speculative market. In 2022, the bubble collapsed: NFT trading volume fell from approximately $17 billion in January 2022 to $400 million in November, a 97% decline. Christie's saw a similar drop, from roughly $150 million in NFT sales in 2021 to $5.9 million in 2022 — about 96% down.

This changes the historical interpretation. The technology itself didn't disappear, but the financial narrative surrounding it collapsed. The extraordinary prices of 2021 could no longer be treated as straightforward evidence of artistic value. And this raises the real question worth asking: if scarcity created value, what happens when the market no longer believes that value is worth paying for?

This doesn't mean digital art itself lost its value. What lost value was a particular economic model and speculative expectation surrounding NFTs. Digital art existed long before NFTs, and continues independently of them — which is ultimately the more interesting design question: how do we assign value to something that costs nothing to reproduce, once the hype is gone?