Most in the crypto space think NFTs are already passé.
In the art world, most think NFTs are a scam, a brief hustle that fleeced some Hollywood types and crypto founders from Singapore before disappearing.
Then there is a third group, the loudest, that’s been repeating the same three lines for four years:
· “It’s just a JPEG.”
· “I can right-click and save your million-dollar monkey.”
· “NFTs are a scam, pumping out random animal pictures.”
If you’ve been online after 2021, you’ve heard these three lines, and maybe even said them yourself.
But all of it is wrong, and the data clearly shows that, yet I'm baffled why no one has publicly pointed this out.
In 2025, traditional art market transactions hit $59.6 billion, up 4% from the previous year, but still below the peak of $67.8 billion in 2022.
Currently, the NFT market is around $2 billion, down about 90% from its peak. At first glance, you’d say, “NFTs lost.”
But you can’t just look at the surface. Because the entire art world — the museums, the top galleries, the auction houses, and the most seasoned collectors — have been quietly building infrastructure for the thing they’ve been saying is “already dead” for the past four years.
This isn’t a pump piece that will tell you your favorite PFP’s floor price is about to 50x. This piece will take you inside:
· What the gatekeepers of the art world have done while everyone watches the price.
· Why every major art movement has been ridiculed for decades before being accepted.
· Why the arguments against NFTs hold no water.
1. The Indestructible Market You Think Is Actually Shrinking
The traditional art market is valued at $596 billion. This figure was revealed in a 2026 report by Art Basel and UBS. The report was authored by Dr. Clare McAndrew, the most respected analyst in the field for over a decade.
By NFT standards, this number may seem significant. However, there are some truths about this number that no one has told you:
· Stagnant Growth: It has declined from its high of $678 billion in 2022 and experienced two consecutive years of decline before a slight rebound.
· Shrinking Mid-Market: The market for works priced below $50,000 has been shrinking for over a decade.
· High Value Concentration: In public auctions, works priced over $1 million represent less than 1% of the total number of lots but account for 54% of the total value.
· Wealth Transfer: The report also points to a significant upcoming inflection point: the "great money transfer." Over the next two decades, over $80 trillion in assets will pass from the Baby Boomer generation to their descendants.
Read again that phrase "1% of lots contribute 54% of value." The traditional art market is not truly a $600 billion market. It is a $300 billion mass market plus a $300 billion "high-roller casino" where billionaires trade Basquiats and Picassos as efficient tax vehicles.
And this top-tier market has a problem: the buyers are aging, the dealers are aging, and the infrastructure is aging. The young people inheriting $80 trillion are not the ones who grew up paging through Sotheby's catalogs.
They are children of the internet.
So, before discussing NFTs, be clear: NFT's supposed competition is not in a vibrant, expanding market. It's in an aging market riddled with serious concentration issues and facing an intergenerational handover where the inheritors don't want the old stuff. And that is what people call "safe assets."
In the high-end market, seasoned collectors are increasingly focused on estate planning, liquidity, and succession, rather than exploring new art mediums.
Now let's take a look at how those in charge of art are actually using their money.
II. While You Weren't Looking, the Gatekeepers Moved
The art world has a very particular mechanism to legitimize a new art medium. The process is as follows:
· A few artists create works in a new form.
· Critics ridicule, collectors ignore.
· A few brave curators include these works in institutional collections.
· Other museums, seeing the acquisition, follow suit.
· Auction houses notice the institutional shift and start auctioning such works.
· Top galleries sign on these artists.
· Prices continue to rise over the next generations.
This is the tried-and-true trick, applicable to photography, video art, installation art – every medium initially considered "not truly art" by the art world.
And this trick is currently playing out in the digital art and blockchain art space. Most are unaware that the early stages have already quietly transpired.
Here are some works that are part of the permanent collections of major museums:
· Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA): In 2023, acquired Refik Anadol's artwork "Unsupervised." The piece hung in the museum's lobby for nearly a year, attracting 3 million visitors. The acquisition also includes a companion NFT and a visitor-minted blockchain collectible.
That same year, MoMA also acquired Ian Cheng's "3FACE." This is a generative NFT that can read the owner's wallet contents and mutate with changes in the wallet's contents. Such conceptual art pieces would not exist without blockchain.
· Pompidou Center (Paris): In 2023, acquired 18 NFT works from 13 artists. The collection includes CryptoPunks, Autoglyph, and works by Sarah Meyohas, among others. Curator Marcella Lista described it as a natural extension of the museum's holdings of masters like Bruce Nauman.
· Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Home to one of the world's most authoritative collections of blockchain art. In February 2023, collector Cozomo de' Medici donated 22 pieces of generative art and blockchain works, including CryptoPunks, Dmitri Cherniak's Ringer, and Tyler Hobbs' works.
This is the largest blockchain art donation the American museum has received to date. In addition, the founder of Art Blocks and Erick Calderon directly donated the final version of Chromie Squiggle to the museum, which is considered the pioneering work of the entire on-chain generative art movement. LACMA has also established the first fund in an American museum specifically dedicated to a digital art collection featuring women artists.
· Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami): It was one of the earliest institutions to take action by accepting the donation of CryptoPunk #5293. In 2022, Yuga Labs donated a second Punk and launched the "Punks Legacy Program" aimed at bringing CryptoPunks to major museums worldwide.
· The Whitney Museum of American Art (The Whitney): The Whitney has quietly been collecting digital art and net art for years, including two works by Rafaël Rozendaal in its permanent collection. Since 2001, they have been operating a digital exhibition platform called Artport.
· Buffalo AKG Art Museum: In late 2022, they hosted the "Peer to Peer" exhibition, the first blockchain art exhibition held by an American museum. The curator highlighted a historical milestone to remember: in 1910, the same museum hosted the first photography exhibition in an American museum. In 1910, photography was still not considered art, three-quarters of a century after the invention of photography.
· Guggenheim Museum: In 2024, they exhibited Jenny Holzer's "Light Line," a 900-foot-long scrolling LED installation that integrates AI-generated text.
The Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami), The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Center, and the Guggenheim Museum together form the institutional backbone of American and European contemporary art, all of which have formally pledged their support for digital art and blockchain art over the past four years.
Those who are not paying attention will tell you that institutions don't care. However, these institutions have already made a public entrance. The reason the market is ignoring it is simply because the floor price has dropped.
3. Every art movement you now take seriously was originally a joke
This is something that is often overlooked by the crypto community but widely understood in the art world.
In 1863, the official French art exhibition, the "Paris Salon," rejected over 2,000 paintings. Due to the outcry over the rejections, Napoleon III ordered the creation of the "Salon of the Refused." Crowds flocked to see the works, but mostly to ridicule them. Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" was a centerpiece of this, derided by critics as vulgar.
Today, this painting is considered one of the foundational works of modern art and is housed in the Musée d'Orsay. If this painting were ever to be sold, its value would be immeasurable.
In 1874, a group of artists who had been rejected by the official Salon held their own exhibition. A critic used Monet's painting "Impression, Sunrise" as a mockery and insulted them with the term "Impressionists."
This name stuck, and it later became one of the most significant movements in art history.
It wasn't until 1987, over a hundred years after the Salon of the Refused, that a painting by Van Gogh broke the auction record for a modern artwork, surpassing prices that had been dominated by classical masters. "Sunflowers" sold at Christie's for nearly $40 million.
Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. Today, his works regularly fetch prices exceeding $100 million at auctions.
This lag effect is an inevitable part of every artistic revolution, without exception.
This does not mean that artistic recognition always takes a century. Rather, it means that ridicule often precedes recognition, institutional acceptance follows, and market repricing comes last.
Take Pop Art, for example. In July 1962, Andy Warhol's "Campbell's Soup Cans" series exhibition opened at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Next door, a gallery openly mocked the display by placing real Campbell's soup cans in their window with a sign saying "Soups, 29 cents each." Out of the 32 paintings, only 5 sold. Gallery owner Irving Blum eventually bought back the entire set for $1,000.
These 32 soup can paintings are now among the most prized possessions of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. One piece from this series was privately sold for over $9 million.
That grocery store has long been forgotten.
Take Conceptual art, for example. In 1967, Sol LeWitt published "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" in Artforum magazine. The opening sentence was, "The idea itself becomes the machine that makes the art." At that time, the art world generally viewed this as fringe philosophy.
Early conceptual artists deliberately created artworks that couldn't be collected, only documented through agreements, instructions, and certificates, in part to criticize the gallery system. They attempted to escape the market.
Sol LeWitt's auction record has now surpassed $1.6 million. His wall drawings are now held in major museums worldwide.
Conceptually, a wall drawing is akin to a smart contract. Someone writes the rules, someone executes. The "art" exists within the agreement.
He invented a framework for art that runs on-chain, though there was no blockchain to run this framework at the time, predating the blockchain by fifty years.
Now, consider how long the birth of this art took. The following section should enlighten you:
· Impressionism: From being ridiculed in 1863 to breaking a modernist auction record in 1987, it took 124 years.
· Pop Art: From being mocked in a grocery store in 1962 to being permanently held by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the late 1960s, lasting about fifty years, eventually selling for millions of dollars.
· Conceptual Art: From the 1967 manifesto to auction prices reaching millions, it took about 35 years.
· NFT Art: Quantum, considered by many as the first NFT, was minted in 2014. CryptoPunks were released in 2017. Christie's held its first major NFT art auction in 2021. It took seven years.
Seven years.
Impressionist painters held eight exhibitions before the world even knew what to call them. The first batch of NFT artists are still creating to this day. Most of them are still alive. Most of them are still in the middle of their careers. The pricing strategy applied to Manet, Van Gogh, Warhol, and LeWitt is now quietly unfolding in their realm.
The Impressionists took decades to go from being ridiculed to having a market value of tens of billions of dollars. Conceptual art also faced similar resistance.
The pattern is as follows: a new medium emerges, mainstream society dismisses it, then a large number of creators and collectors start accepting it, institutions follow suit, and then funds flow in.
The pace of development of NFTs has been faster than any art movement in history.
"Ideas are machines for making art." —Sol LeWitt, 1967
He was talking about wall drawings at the time. But his description can also be applied perfectly to smart contracts.
IV. Top Galleries Have Voted with Their Feet
If you want to know which artists will be in the history books 20 years from now, don't look at auction prices; look at which galleries have signed them. Galleries like Pace, Gagosian, and Hauser & Wirth control who gets into museums and textbooks. They are the most conservative players in the art world, only signing on when they think an artist will still be important 50 years from now.
Pace Gallery: Established in 1960, representing legacies like Rothko and Sol LeWitt. Sol LeWitt, the artist, has the closest connection to the concept legacy of NFT art. In November 2021, Pace launched an exclusive NFT and Web 3 platform called Pace Verso. Since then, they have collaborated with many renowned artists under their umbrella, releasing a series of NFT projects:
· Jeff Koons (sculpture sent to the moon)
· Maya Lin
· Trevor Paglen
· teamLab
· DRIFT
· Tara Donovan
· Lucas Samaras
· John Gerrard
· Loie Hollowell
· Leo Villareal
· Random International
Take a good look at this list. These artists are not newcomers to the cryptocurrency field. They are prominent figures in the contemporary art world releasing NFT works for the first time through one of the top three galleries.
Later, in March 2023, Pace did something even more meaningful. They held a solo exhibition for Tyler Hobbs, a generative art artist who has grown in the on-chain art scene, at their flagship gallery in New York. Twelve large-scale paintings derived from his QQL algorithm were exhibited in the same gallery as works by Rothko and Calder.
The QQL Mint Pass was sold in September of the previous year for $17 million. A month later, during the crypto bear market, its secondary market price skyrocketed to $28 million.
Pace Gallery hosting a solo exhibition for a generative NFT artist was not a gimmick but a statement.
This is not an isolated case:
· Lehmann Maupin gallery became the first commercial gallery to accept cryptocurrency payments.
· Hauser & Wirth gallery exhibited NFT-related works by Jenny Holzer.
· Gagosian gallery started accepting cryptocurrency payments.
· Sotheby's launched an exclusive metaverse marketplace in 2021, with NFT sales exceeding $100 million. Despite most markets abandoning on-chain royalties, they still continue to pay royalties to artists.
· Christie's introduced Christie's 3.0 in October 2022, the first fully blockchain-based auction platform launched by a traditional auction house.
Auction houses and top galleries are not doing this out of necessity. Even without cryptocurrency, their business is substantial. They are doing this because the wise minds in the most conservative corners of the art world have studied the data and concluded that the collecting trends of the next 25 years will unfold here.
Five, Concrete Data
Mike Winkelmann created a digital painting every day for thirteen consecutive years and posted them online, with almost no recognition. He had a small group of fans, no gallery representation, no museum attention, and no place in the traditional art world.
However, in March 2021, Christie's auctioned off a file containing all 5000 of his pieces stitched together, ultimately selling for $69.3 million. His online alias is Beeple.
Now, let's bring all the data together.
· Beeple, "Everydays: The First 5000 Days": Sold for $69.3 million at Christie's auction house in March 2021. This marked the first time a major auction house offered a purely digital NFT artwork. Beeple also became the third most valuable living artist in the world as a result.
· Pak, "The Merge": Achieved a total of $91.8 million in 2021, arguably the highest publicly recorded sale for a living artist to date. However, this comparison is contentious as the artwork was fractionalized into multiple units for sale.
· Beeple, "HUMAN ONE": Sold for $29 million at Christie's auction house in November 2021. This piece is a mixed-media sculpture combining physical and digital elements, including a dynamic NFT component.
· Dmitri Cherniak, "Ringers #879": Sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby's auction house in June 2023, during a bear market. This price is the second-highest ever for a generative art piece at auction. The total sales for the day at the Sotheby's GRAILS auction were around $11 million, setting eight new artist records. This was not a frenzy of 2021 but a show of unwavering belief in the depths of the 2023 crypto winter.
· Tyler Hobbs, "Fidenza #725": Sold for over $1 million at a May 2023 Sotheby's evening contemporary art auction, five times its high estimate.
· XCOPY, "Right-click and Save As Guy": Sold for around $7 million at a SuperRare auction at the end of 2021. Several of his pieces have achieved prices in the millions.
· Refik Anadol, in addition to being collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, became the first artist to project onto the façade of the Las Vegas Sphere building in September 2023, where he resided for four months. His works have previously been displayed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Bartro House, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. He became Google's first artist in residence in 2016.
These are not isolated incidents but part of a whole.
Today, a significant number of digital artists are active in the art world, with their auction prices reaching up to seven or even eight figures, their works being collected by museums across three continents, and holding a place in top contemporary art galleries.
Five years ago, such a group did not exist.
The hype of speculation has passed, but the infrastructure remains solid. And those who built the infrastructure will not wait for you to realize this.
Six, the New Generation of the "Medici Family" Has Started Collecting
If you want to understand the future market trends of a certain asset class, look for those who continue to accumulate assets during a bear market.
There is a collector who goes by the name "Cozomo de' Medici." The spread of this name is not accidental.
The original Medici family once sponsored Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Donatello, at a time when these artists were relatively unknown, and painting as an art form was just emerging. If we calculate the return on those investments over time, it is almost infinite.
When others did not understand, the Medici family understood that the medium was changing, and those who first realized this would shape the classics.
In February 2023, Cozomo de' Medici donated 22 generative art pieces to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The name Medici family represented everything. They bet that internet art would be remembered by future generations just like the Florentine Renaissance.
They are not fighting alone:
· Punk6529: This anonymous collector acquired "The Goose" for $6.2 million. They operate a museum district in the metaverse, showcasing over two thousand pieces. At its peak, their personal collection was valued at over $20 million. For years, they have publicly written that NFTs are not transactions, but rather a new system of owning digital culture.
· Flamingo DAO: A group of about one hundred members that began pooling funds in October 2020. They own the only complete existing CryptoPunks attribute set, as well as a full set of Autoglyphs. They hold an Alien Punk, which was purchased in 2021 for about $750,000 and is now worth around $13 million. The peak valuation of their portfolio reached $1 billion.
· PleasrDAO: Acquired the only existing Wu-Tang Clan album from the US federal government, which was previously confiscated from Martin Shkreli. They also purchased Edward Snowden's Stay Free NFT for over $5 million. Additionally, they acquired the original Doge meme NFT and fractionalized it for sale. PleasrDAO received support from a16z.
These are not retail speculators or average buyers. They are collectors and groups with sufficient funds, conviction, and cultural literacy to continue investing post-NFT hype and see NFT collections as an investable asset.
Coupled with anonymous institutional collectors, quietly buying family offices, and the fact that Christie's blockchain auctions are now substantial enough to support their dedicated platform, you'll find that the reality does not match the public proclamation that "NFTs are dead."
NFTs are accruing. It's just that their holders aren't flaunting their portfolios on Twitter every day.
The example of the Medici family is the essence of the entire transaction:
Finding the medium they want to collect before future institutions realize they need to collect it and acquiring foundational works at a relatively low price when its value is far below its future value.
That's what the original Medicis did.
7. Redefinition
If you've read this far, you should already know what I'm going to say.
The traditional art market is shrinking, consolidating, and aging. Its primary buyers are seniors. Its infrastructure is built for a generation that did not grow up in the digital age. The next generation, those who have lived through the digital age, are about to inherit $80 trillion from them.
Some of the most important contemporary art institutions in the US and Europe have formally committed to investing in digital and online art.
Every significant art movement in the last 150 years has been ridiculed for decades before being taken seriously. Yet, NFT art history is only 7 to 12 years old.
Leading galleries have made their choices. Pace Gallery hosted a solo exhibition for Tyler Hobbs. Sotheby's operates a dedicated digital art platform. Christie's operates a fully online auction platform.
The auction prices are out. Beeple sold for a whopping $69 million. Pak valued at $91 million. Cherniak valued at $6.2 million during the bear market. Anadol's artwork appeared on the Las Vegas Sphere.
Collectors are hoarding in bulk, including Flamingo, PleasrDAO, 6529, Cozomo, and those lesser-known family offices.
Here are the most common misconceptions about NFTs.
They think NFTs are a transaction category. They are not. They are an ownership system. Before NFTs, digital culture had infinite channels of distribution but zero ownership. Everything was being shared, nothing could be truly held, all value flowed to platforms rather than the creators or collectors of the work.
NFTs have disrupted all of this. Culture can now be infinitely spread while still being held in a limited manner.
That is the crux of the matter. An artwork's price has always depended on three factors: provenance, story, and cultural relevance, and on-chain ownership does not replace any of them. It enhances all three.
Blockchain-based, socially consensual scarce artwork is a new scarce resource, and those now collecting this art are doing what every generational authority collector has done at the birth of every ultimately significant art medium.
What really makes the whole argument stand is this:
On-chain art is the first ownership history that has been programmatically, publicly, and time-stamped recorded from the very inception of a major art category.
It doesn't solve all problems: copyright, storage, authorship, and cultural value remain crucial. But it is more effective at addressing artwork provenance issues than the traditional art market.
The traditional art market loses billions of dollars annually due to forgeries, lost provenance, and ownership disputes. The United States' oldest gallery, the 165-year-old Knoedler Gallery, closed in 2011 after selling $80 million worth of forgeries, including genuine Rothkos and Pollocks. Even the $450 million sale at Christie's of the "Salvator Mundi" labeled as a "Leonardo da Vinci" work is still disputed.
On-chain art does not have this issue. The origin of the artwork is the medium itself. Every past owner can be verified. Every transaction has a timestamp. Every smart contract is auditable.
For the first time in history, an artwork and its complete ownership history are an immutable mathematical object.
You can right-click to save a JPEG image, but you cannot right-click to save the artwork's provenance. That's the key.
This is the ultimate realization of Sol LeWitt's concept of "dematerialization" proposed in 1967.
Idea as machine. Machine creates art. Blockchain records everything.
If you truly dissect the museum's collection, auction records, gallery representation, collector community, historical timeline, inheritance status, structural issues of the traditional art market, and the advantage of on-chain source tracing in terms of ownership, you will realize that the market value of NFT artworks cannot remain at $2 billion forever.
$2 billion is the current market value of an asset class:
· The world's most prestigious museums are collecting seminal works;
· The world's most conservative galleries are signing on their artists;
· The world's most professional collectors are quietly accumulating;
· The clearest provenance system ever;
· Trillions of dollars in inheritance are about to fall into the hands of buyers who grew up with screens, and this intergenerational wealth transfer will bring massive returns.
The bet is not on the price, but on the medium itself.
And this medium has already won the only crucial argument: the institutions that decide what is "art" have made their decision.
The truly valuable part of NFT art has survived the speculative collapse and its institutionalization has outpaced most controversial art movements in history.
Pessimists argue that the demise of NFTs is due to the speculative market crash. But institutional records show that speculation died, but the medium itself survived.
This is not to say that all PFPs will make a comeback; most will not. Nor does it imply that all 2021 collections are crucial. What is meant here is that the foundational works of on-chain art are being actively curated, collected, interpreted, and establishing their canonical status in real-time.
The key is not "NFTs are back."
The key is that digital art is entering art history, yet most people still treat it with the same fervor as they would something outdated.
In 1965, you could buy a Warhol piece for the price of a used car. Now, the same artwork sells for a figure in the high eight digits. Today, the price of foundational digital art matches that of a 1965 Warhol piece. This is not hearsay but a fact you can verify.
Salons once mocked Manet. Grocery stores once mocked Warhol. Today, those who mock Beeple, Anadol, Hobbs, and Cherniak sound very much like those who mocked each new medium before it transformed into art.
History always proves who ends up looking foolish in this game. The only question now is, will you act before those who haven't read this article?
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