Are NFTs Dead? What the Data Says About the 2026 NFT Market

By Ryan Bethencourt, author of ZERO and PUNKS. Published November 4, 2026. Last updated November 4, 2026. Figures current as of October 20, 2026.

Tracker	Period	Figure	What it measures	Source and date
The Block (data dashboard)	2022, the peak year	More than $50 billion	NFT trading volume across chains, by year	The Block, June 3, 2026
The Block	2025	About $5.5 billion	NFT trading volume across chains, by year	The Block, December 25, 2025
The Block	Fourth quarter of 2025	$1.25 billion, down 28 percent from the third quarter	NFT trading volume, by quarter	The Block, June 3, 2026
The Block	December 2025	$303 million	NFT trading volume, by month	The Block, June 3, 2026
DappRadar	2022	$57.2 billion from 121.7 million sales	NFT trading volume and sales on the chains and markets it tracks	DappRadar via The Block, January 15, 2025
DappRadar	2024	$13.7 billion from 49.8 million sales	Same as above	DappRadar via The Block, January 15, 2025
CryptoSlam	December 2023	$1.78 billion	NFT sales, by month	CryptoSlam via Decrypt, October 13, 2026
CryptoSlam	September 2025	$554.8 million	NFT sales, by month	CryptoSlam via Decrypt, October 13, 2026
CryptoSlam	September 2026	$167.2 million	NFT sales, by month	CryptoSlam via Decrypt, October 13, 2026
OpenSea (one marketplace)	May 1, 2022	$2.7 billion	OpenSea’s all-time best day of trading	Wikipedia, OpenSea; PUNKS, Chapter 17
OpenSea	August 28, 2022	$9.34 million, down 99 percent from the peak	OpenSea’s daily trading	Wikipedia, OpenSea; PUNKS, Chapter 17
Decrypt	2026, as of June 8	$32.3 million	Ethereum’s top NFT sales day of 2026 to that date, set against Ethereum NFT days above $100 million in early 2022	Decrypt, June 8, 2026

In this article: Are NFTs dead in 2026? | How much did NFT trading fall? | Why did the NFT market crash? | Which NFT marketplaces have closed? | What did the closures mean for NFT owners? | Are NFTs securities? | What are people buying as NFTs now? | Did anything survive the NFT crash? | So, are NFTs dead? A participant’s verdict | FAQ

Are NFTs dead in 2026?

No. NFTs are not dead in 2026, but the NFT boom of 2021 and 2022 is over. On The Block’s count, 2025 trading came to roughly a tenth of its 2022 size, while the tokens, the contracts that issue them and the public records of who owns them keep working.

The question gets two answers because “NFT” means two things:

• A market: the 2021 to 2022 run of profile pictures, auction records and mint-and-flip trading. The market collapsed.
• A technology: a token on a public ledger that records who holds a particular thing, from a pixel portrait to a graded Pokémon card in a vault. The technology kept doing its job, more cheaply than before.

Measure	At the peak (2021 to 2022)	By October 2026
Yearly NFT trading (The Block’s data)	More than $50 billion in 2022	About $5.5 billion in 2025
Biggest single days	$2.7 billion on OpenSea alone, May 1, 2022	$32.3 million, Ethereum’s top NFT sales day of 2026 as of June 8 (Decrypt)
Ethereum’s average transaction fee (BitInfoCharts, as recorded in PUNKS)	About $21 across 2021; $196.68 on May 1, 2022	$0.146 on October 17, 2026
Marketplaces	OpenSea handled about 97 percent of Ethereum NFT marketplace volume at the start of 2022	Nifty Gateway, Foundation, X2Y2, Kraken NFT, Binance NFT and Exchange Art closed; blur.io set to retire on November 12, 2026
Creator royalties	Honored because the biggest marketplaces chose to honor them	Optional on the major marketplaces since 2023; enforced only where a token’s own rules require it
Regulators	SEC investigation of Yuga Labs reported by Bloomberg (October 2022)	SEC interpretation (March 17, 2026) naming CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles as digital collectibles, not securities
CryptoPunks	Brand and IP sold by Larva Labs to Yuga Labs (March 2022)	IP owned by the nonprofit NODE Foundation (May 2025); eight Punks in MoMA’s collection (December 2025)

Read down the right-hand column and both answers are visible at once. The crowd left and the storefronts closed, while records got cheaper to write and museums began collecting the best-known works.

How much did NFT trading fall?

NFT trading fell about 90 percent from the 2022 peak to 2025, on The Block’s data: from more than $50 billion in 2022 to about $5.5 billion of NFT trading volume in 2025. Monthly counts kept falling into 2026. For September 2026, CryptoSlam’s count of NFT sales was $167.2 million, about 70 percent below September 2025 and about 91 percent below December 2023.

PUNKS lines the trackers up next to each other in its final chapter, and its point is that no two of them measure the same thing:

• DappRadar: yearly totals peak in 2022 and drop to $13.7 billion for 2024.
• The Block: a series that falls about 90 percent from the 2022 peak to 2025, ending the year with a $1.25 billion fourth quarter and a $303 million December.
• The Block, by chain: roughly 45 percent of 2025 NFT trading happened on Ethereum, about 16 percent on Bitcoin, and under 10 percent on Solana (The Block, December 25, 2025).
• CryptoSlam, as Decrypt reports it: a monthly series that slides from $1.78 billion in December 2023 to $554.8 million in September 2025 and $167.2 million in September 2026.

The full comparison is in PUNKS, Chapter Twenty-Two.

How to read NFT trading figures

Three habits make these numbers useful:

1. Compare a tracker only with itself. DappRadar puts 2022 at $57.2 billion and The Block at more than $50 billion, because their coverage and methods differ.
2. Keep the unit attached. In early May 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that the daily count of NFT sales was 92 percent below its September 2021 level, yet DappRadar’s yearly dollar totals still make 2022 the biggest year.
3. Never mistake a forecast for a count. A market-research “NFT market size” figure is not a count of trades on a public ledger.

For scale: OpenSea alone traded $2.7 billion on May 1, 2022, about sixteen times what CryptoSlam counted across the whole market in all of September 2026. The sources differ, so read that as an order of magnitude.

One more caution on chain shares: the Solana Foundation said Solana carried “roughly 60%” of on-chain collectibles volume in June 2026, but its June roundup cites no data source for the figure, which also measures something different from The Block’s NFT totals.

Why did the NFT market crash?

NFTs crashed because the 2021 market ran on resale, cheap money and attention, and all three left in 2022. The top came on the night of the Otherdeeds mint, April 30 to May 1, 2022. The crypto collapses that followed, ending with FTX in November 2022, drained buyers, and marketplaces fought over the traders who remained by cutting the artist’s royalty.

Underneath sat a simple problem: much of the buying was for resale. Chainalysis found that in 2021 only 28.5 percent of NFTs bought at mint and then resold turned a profit, a figure PUNKS cites in Chapter Nine. A market priced on the next buyer needs a steady supply of next buyers, and in 2022 the supply ran out.

The night of the Otherdeeds: the top

PUNKS treats Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds mint as the high-water mark before the NFT market crash of 2022, a night that showed the boom’s excesses on two chains at once:

At 9 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, April 30, 2022, which was 1 a.m. on May 1 in UTC, Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, opened the sale of a world that did not yet exist. Otherside was its planned metaverse, and the tokens on offer were 55,000 Otherdeeds, parcels of its land. The rules had changed the day before. Yuga scrapped a planned Dutch auction and fixed the price at 305 ApeCoin, or APE, per deed, two per wallet. Buyers had to pass identity checks, an odd fit for a market full of pseudonyms, and their wallets had to be approved in advance and already hold APE. On April 29 that price came to about $6,900 a deed. By the time the sale ran, The Block put it at about $5,800, because the price was fixed in APE and APE was worth less.

The deeds sold out within three hours to more than 27,000 buyers. Yuga took in 16.7 million APE, about $317 million, a total The Block described as a record for an NFT mint. The buyers paid a second bill on top of the first. […] That night the gas price reached 8,000 gwei. On-chain data cited by The Block showed buyers spending about $172 million in fees in a few hours, with individual buyers paying $4,000 to $10,000, at the top of that range more than the deed itself cost. […] For every dollar Yuga raised, buyers spent about 54 cents more just getting their transactions in. None of that money went to Yuga.

Excerpted from PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter Seventeen, CC BY-SA 4.0

Solana failed the same night, in the opposite way. A few hours before Yuga’s sale opened, bots spamming Metaplex’s Candy Machine minting program overloaded the network, and Solana produced no blocks for about seven hours, until its validators coordinated a restart. Metaplex answered with a 0.01 SOL penalty for each invalid mint attempt.

Ethereum’s fees had grown high enough to make buyers pay thousands of dollars for a place in line; Solana’s were low enough that bots could flood it almost for free. PUNKS, Chapter Seventeen, tells both halves of the night.

The aftermath, on The Block’s numbers, was brutal. By the week of October 6, 2023, trading in Otherside’s NFTs came to $356,000, about a nine-hundredth of what the land had raised in one night, and the Bored Apes’ floor had fallen 62 percent that year.

OpenSea’s $2.7 billion day and the 99 percent fall

OpenSea’s all-time daily peak came on Sunday, May 1, 2022, the day after the Otherdeeds sale opened, with $2.7 billion of trading. The spike sat on a market that was already thinning, as The Wall Street Journal’s report of falling daily sales showed within days.

Then the wider crypto market broke. Terra’s stablecoin collapsed in May 2022, the week told in Chapter Ten of HYPE, the series’ book on decentralized finance. Three Arrows Capital, one of 2021’s most visible buyers of digital art, was ordered into liquidation by a British Virgin Islands court on June 27. OpenSea cut about a fifth of its staff on July 14, and on August 28 its daily volume was $9.34 million, 99 percent below the May peak.

PUNKS is careful about cause: a peak followed by a fall does not by itself prove that the Otherdeed sale caused the slide.

The royalty wars

As volume shrank, marketplaces competed for the traders who remained, and the easiest thing to cut was the artist’s share of each resale. X2Y2 experimented with cutting royalties in February 2022 and Sudoswap launched without them in July. On Solana, DeGods cut its own royalties to zero on October 10, 2022 (see the complete history of DeGods), and Magic Eden made them optional five days later.

Blur launched in October 2022, rewarded traders with airdrop points for trading and bidding, and passed OpenSea in volume that December. OpenSea’s Operator Filter, which let new collections block marketplaces that skipped royalties, lasted until August 31, 2023. Yuga Labs’ quarterly royalty revenue fell from $8.7 million to $2.5 million between the first and third quarters of 2023, by The Block Research’s figures.

FTX, Solana and the BONK airdrop

Solana’s NFT market took a second blow when FTX, Alameda Research and over a hundred related companies filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2022. Within a week SOL had lost more than half its price. It touched about $8 on December 29. Solana NFTs were priced in SOL, so even a collection whose SOL floor did not move lost over half of its dollar value. LIGHT, the series’ Solana book, tells the collapse from the chain’s side, and our account of how Solana survived FTX follows the recovery.

Christmas Day 2022 brought two pieces of news. A dog token called BONK airdropped about half of its 100 trillion supply, and much of its recipient list was built from about 297,000 Solana NFTs. Six weeks after FTX failed, owning a Solana NFT could earn a wallet a share of the drop. BONK’s later life as a memecoin is told in DOGE, the series’ memecoin book, and our essay on what meme coins teach about hypercompetition picks up the thread.

On Christmas Day as well, the team behind DeGods and y00ts, which by Magic Eden data reported by CoinDesk had made up nearly 70 percent of Solana NFT sale volume the week before, confirmed that both collections would leave Solana. y00ts went to Polygon and then, in 2023, to Ethereum, handing back a $3 million grant (the full history of y00ts follows both moves). The builders who stayed answered with engineering: by November 14, 2023, compression had let the free-collectibles app DRiP mint more than 68 million NFTs for “around $12,000” in total.

Which NFT marketplaces have closed?

The best-known NFT marketplaces to close or announce a shutdown between November 2024 and October 2026 are Nifty Gateway, Foundation, X2Y2, Kraken NFT, Binance NFT and Exchange Art. In all, more than a dozen NFT marketplaces, services, events and networks closed or announced closures in that period.

Two more shutdowns are scheduled: Blur’s website on November 12, 2026 and the Abstract network on December 15, 2026. The table below gives the dates and a source for each.

Platform	What it was	What happened	Source
Kraken NFT	Exchange-run NFT marketplace	Withdrawal-only from November 27, 2024; closed February 27, 2025	Kraken support
RTFKT	Nike’s NFT wearables studio	Wind-down announced December 2, 2024; passed to an unnamed new owner on December 17, 2025, a Nike spokesperson told Bloomberg	PUNKS, Chapter 22
X2Y2	Ethereum NFT marketplace	Announced March 31, 2025; closed April 30, 2025	The Block
Bybit NFT marketplace	Exchange-run NFT marketplace	Closure announced April 1, 2025	PUNKS, Chapter 22
NFT Paris	Annual conference	2026 edition (February 5 to 6) cancelled on January 5, 2026	The Block
Nifty Gateway	Gemini-owned marketplace that hosted the 2021 sale of Pak’s The Merge	Withdrawal-only from January 24, 2026; closed February 23, 2026; withdrawals extended to April 23, 2026	Decrypt
Foundation	Ethereum art marketplace	Shutdown announced in April 2026 after a planned sale to Blackdove fell through	Cointelegraph
Ord.io and Zap	Bitcoin inscription explorer and trading app	Shut June 1, 2026	PUNKS, Chapter 20
Binance NFT	Exchange-run NFT service	Closed July 3, 2026	The Block
Exchange Art	Solana marketplace for digital fine art	Announced July 3, 2026; closed August 1, 2026	BlockBeats via KuCoin; PUNKS, Chapter 13
POAP	Proof-of-attendance badges, nearly 7.6 million issued	Shutdown announced August 3, 2026	The Block
NFTfi	Lending against NFTs as collateral	New loans halted; operations ended August 31, 2026	Digital Today
Blast	Layer-two network from the team behind Blur	Shutdown announced October 2, 2026	PUNKS, Chapter 18
blur.io	Blur’s marketplace website and Blend lending	Website to be retired November 12, 2026; Blur says the protocol stays on-chain	Decrypt
Abstract	Layer-two network of Igloo, the company behind Pudgy Penguins	Announced October 6, 2026; shutting down December 15, 2026	Protos

Not everything closed. OpenSea rebuilt itself in 2025 as OS2, which trades tokens as well as NFTs, and announced Solana NFT trading on August 31, 2026, over four years after a limited beta in 2022. Magic Eden narrowed itself to Solana and gaming in February 2026, and on August 6, 2026 Rarible came back to Solana NFTs.

What did the 2025 and 2026 closures mean for NFT owners?

For owners, the closures came down to custody and storage. When an NFT marketplace closes, the token in a wallet you control is unaffected, because a marketplace is a storefront that reads the ledger, not the ledger itself. Two things can still go wrong. Tokens left in a platform’s custodial account must be withdrawn before its deadline, and if the artwork’s file lives on the company’s servers, the picture can vanish while the token survives.

The record shows both risks. Kraken said NFTs not withdrawn by February 27, 2025 would be “no longer accessible through Kraken.” Nifty Gateway gave custodial users until April 23, 2026 and said it would move its media to Arweave, a permanent storage network. POAP’s badges, by contrast, were expected to stay tradable on-chain, The Block reported.

If a platform you use announces a closure:

1. Check custody. If the NFT sits in an exchange or platform account rather than a wallet whose keys you hold, withdraw it before the deadline.
2. Follow the image link. Open the token’s metadata and see where the file lives. A plain web address on the company’s own domain is the most fragile. An ipfs:// link works only as long as someone keeps paying to pin a copy. Arweave storage is paid for once, and a contract that draws the image itself is the most durable.
3. Keep your own copy. Save the file, and for IPFS-hosted work, consider pinning it yourself. KnownOrigin, for example, has promised to pay its artists’ IPFS pinning costs only until January 31, 2027.
4. Find another venue. Standard tokens can be listed on any marketplace that supports their chain and format.
5. Close out anything open, from listings and auctions to any loan that uses an NFT as collateral.

For the four places NFT art can live, from a company’s storage bucket to the chain itself, see our guide to where NFT art is actually stored (publishing November 9).

Exchange Art is the closure PUNKS knows best, because its author backed the company. Chapter Thirteen records what was left:

By October 18, 2026, the old storefront’s menus still showed under a closing banner, and the site’s own description read: “Exchange.art is closed. Thank you to every artist and collector who built this community with us.” Its API host no longer answered. The cloud storage bucket that had served its optimized images was gone, and the third-party sites that still pointed to it got back a one-word error: NoSuchBucket. Exchange Art and Code Canvas Limited had ceased operations; no lawsuit, regulatory action or insolvency filing against either has been found.

[…]

As an investor I have to record the result plainly. The company I backed in its first year did not reach its fifth birthday, and after its sale to BONK it lasted sixteen months. No public figure tells how much money passed through it. The art it sold is a different matter. Degen Poet’s typewriter works, Lorna Mills’s debut, a Warhol Punk with its royalty split written into the token: they still exist on Solana with their makers’ wallets in the metadata and, for most, their files on a network designed to outlive companies. The storefront closed. The record stayed.

Excerpted from PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable by Ryan Bethencourt, Chapter Thirteen, CC BY-SA 4.0

The lesson is architectural. Exchange Art’s works were standard Metaplex NFTs, with each creator’s wallet and royalty split written into the token and most files on Arweave, so the art could leave with its owners. The pieces that depended on the company, its API and its own image bucket, are the pieces that broke.

Are NFTs securities?

An NFT that is simply a collectible is not a security, under the SEC’s view as of October 2026. On March 17, 2026, the SEC published an interpretation, with guidance from the CFTC, that names CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles as examples of “digital collectibles” and says such assets are not themselves securities. It is an agency interpretation, not a law passed by Congress.

The road there ran through two settlements. On August 28, 2023, in a case The Block described as the agency’s first NFT enforcement action, the SEC charged Impact Theory, a media company headquartered in Los Angeles, which had raised about $30 million from hundreds of investors through NFTs it called Founder’s Keys; it settled without admitting or denying the findings.

Antonia Apps, who ran the New York Regional Office of the SEC, said securities offerings must be registered unless an exemption applies, whatever form they take. Two commissioners dissented the same day: Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda wrote that the agency does not usually bring enforcement actions against people who sell watches, paintings or collectibles.

By early 2025 the two dissenters were in charge, Uyeda as acting chairman and Peirce at the head of the agency’s crypto task force, and over the next few months the SEC’s NFT inquiries closed one after another. The full record, from the first settlement to the 2026 interpretation:

Date	Who	What happened	Outcome
August 28, 2023	Impact Theory	SEC order found its Founder’s Keys were investment contracts	Settled for more than $6.1 million, without admitting or denying the findings
September 13, 2023	Stoner Cats 2 LLC	SEC order over more than 10,000 NFTs that sold out in 35 minutes at about $800 each, roughly $8 million in all	Settled for a $1 million civil penalty, without admitting or denying the findings
August 28, 2024	OpenSea	Said it had been sent a Wells notice, a warning from SEC staff that they may recommend charges	OpenSea said on February 21, 2025 that the investigation had ended without enforcement; it was never charged
December 2024	CyberKongz	Received a Wells notice	Said on April 15, 2025 that the probe was closed
March 3, 2025	Yuga Labs	Said the SEC had closed an investigation first reported by Bloomberg in October 2022	No charges; the closure is by Yuga’s account
March 17, 2026	SEC, with CFTC guidance	Interpretation, Release No. 33-11412	Names CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles as digital collectibles, which are not securities

The March 2026 release sorts crypto assets into five categories: digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins and digital securities. Its examples of digital collectibles are CryptoPunks, Chromie Squiggles, Fan Tokens, the memecoin WIF and VCOIN, and it treats memecoins as a kind of digital collectible. A footnote addresses royalties directly: “the existence of a creator royalty does not change a digital collectible into a security.” The release took effect on March 23, 2026.

What it leaves open matters as much. The release says a non-security crypto asset “can be offered and sold subject to an investment contract,” so a project that sells NFTs with promises of profit from its own work can still be selling securities. A later commission can also revise the interpretation. This describes the rules as of October 2026; it is not legal advice.

What are people buying as NFTs now?

In 2026, people buy NFTs increasingly as titles to physical things, alongside work by known artists and free or nearly free collectibles. What are NFTs used for now? The 2026 record shows three uses:

• Titles to physical things. Much of the remaining trade moved to tokenized trading cards, many of them on Solana.
• Art by known artists. Art fairs and museums opened space for code-based art.
• Free or nearly free collectibles. The cost of minting fell close to zero.

How do tokenized trading cards work?

A tokenized card is a deed, not a picture. After grading, the card is checked by the platform or a custody provider, stored in a vault and given an on-chain asset that records its set, grade and certification. The token can then change hands while the card stays put; a holder who redeems it gets the card shipped, and the token is retired, as the Solana Foundation’s explainer describes.

The numbers grew fast. Collector Crypt, a Solana marketplace for graded cards, passed $1 billion in total platform volume in May 2026 (Foundation’s May roundup) and $1.6 billion by July, a volume figure the Foundation credits to the analytics firm Artemis, with more than 130,000 cards tokenized.

Phygitals’ cumulative gross merchandise volume went past $500 million in September 2026, the month a Charizard sold on Collector Crypt for $825,000, according to the Foundation’s September roundup. OpenSea opened a hub for tokenized trading cards in late September 2026.

A card token is only as good as its custodian; the Epilogue of PUNKS makes the same point about any deed, which is worth no more than what backs it.

Is anyone still buying NFT art?

Yes, at a smaller scale and with institutions in the room. The last chapter of PUNKS opens at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025, where the fair gave digital art a section of its own, Zero 10: about a dozen exhibitors in 10,000 square feet, curated by Eli Scheinman with OpenSea’s support.

Beeple’s Regular Animals, robot dogs wearing the heads of Warhol, Zuckerberg, Musk, Picasso and Beeple himself, were built to turn out 1,024 free prints, and every fourth print had a QR code for claiming one of 256 free NFTs. Art Blocks showed all 497 outputs of Quine, made by the CryptoPunks’ creators Matt Hall and John Watkinson, in one vitrine; each output draws its own source code into its image. PUNKS, Chapter Twenty-Two, tells the scene in full.

From there the chapter makes its central case, and labels it an argument rather than a measured fact. A model can now generate a convincing image in seconds, so the image alone proves nothing about who made it or when. A public record of which wallet published which file, in which block, still can, and a flood of generated images makes that record more useful, not less. That provenance argument is the strongest case for NFTs after the boom, and Larva Labs built the same idea into the CryptoPunks contract in 2017.

Minting itself kept growing. Metaplex reported a record 1.2 million mints in August 2026 through Bubblegum v2, its program for compressed NFTs, and said more than 8.7 million assets had been created with its newer Core standard.

Did anything survive the NFT crash?

Yes. The records, the best-known collections and the institutions that now keep them survived the NFT crash. The CryptoPunks contract of 2017 still runs unchanged, a nonprofit now owns the Punks’ intellectual property, MoMA holds eight Punks, and art stored on durable networks outlived the storefronts that sold it.

CryptoPunks. The 2017 contract does not hold the images. It holds a SHA-256 fingerprint of one composite image of all 10,000 faces, and a copy of that file downloaded from Larva Labs’ GitHub in October 2026 still produces the same hash.

In May 2025 the nonprofit NODE Foundation bought the full CryptoPunks IP from Yuga Labs, leaving the tokens with their holders and the contract unchanged. In December 2025 MoMA added eight CryptoPunks and eight Chromie Squiggles to its collection, all donated. See our complete history of CryptoPunks.

Blue-chip art at auction. Three Arrows Capital bought Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers #879, The Goose, for 1,800 ETH in August 2021. After the fund’s liquidation, Sotheby’s sold it on June 15, 2023 for $6,215,100 with fees, to the 6529 NFT Fund. The hedge fund that bought at the top was gone. The work and its record of owners were not.

Art written into the chain. OnChainMonkey put its whole collection on Bitcoin on February 8, 2023, as a single 19,408-byte HTML file of code, inscription #20,219, in block 775,635. That block is part of every complete copy of the Bitcoin blockchain, so the monkeys can be drawn whether or not any marketplace survives.

Brands that moved to the shelf. In September 2023 Pudgy Penguins said its toys were going on sale in about 2,000 Walmart stores. The tokens did not escape the market: by The Block’s count, the Pudgy floor fell about 75 percent in 2025.

Keepers. Artists rebuilt their own archives, as Degen Poet did for his older Exchange Art collections, and on October 18, 2026, the catalog of the Solana Historical Society showed 130 of its 141 records as verified against primary sources. One warning travels with the good news: ZKM Karlsruhe, the earliest entry on NODE’s list of institutions holding Punks, lost two of its four to an accidental burn in a wallet transfer.

For how the record began, see our history of NFTs from 2012 to 2026.

So, are NFTs dead? A participant’s verdict

The 2021 NFT market is gone, but the NFT as a public record of who made a digital thing, and who holds it now, is not. That is my verdict, and it is narrower than either camp wants.

I am not a neutral observer, so here is where I stand. In spring 2021 I watched founders and VCs on my feed switch to pixel faces. I missed buying a CryptoPunk early, though I loved their cypherpunk ethos. I collected CrypToadz and OnChainMonkey on Ethereum and found the gas painful, then bridged to Solana in 2021 and have been at every Breakpoint since the first, in Lisbon.

I backed Exchange Art early, and it closed on August 1, 2026. I also co-founded the Solana Historical Society.

If “NFTs” means the 2021 market, with its gas wars, flips and land in a metaverse that did not yet exist, the trackers have answered: it is gone, and nothing in the 2026 data says when or whether it returns. If “NFTs” means a public, checkable record of who made a digital thing and who holds it now, that record has outlasted the storefronts, the funds and the hype, and writing one can now cost cents or less.

The questions that matter now are the old ones: who keeps the file, who pays the maker, and who honors the deed. You can follow all three in our guide to NFTs and crypto art. The final chapter of PUNKS lands in the same place: most of the speculators had gone, but the records remained, and people were still paying for titles.

Frequently asked questions

Will NFTs come back?

Nobody can know, and this article makes no forecast. What would have to change is measurable: sustained growth in monthly NFT sales on trackers such as CryptoSlam, which counted $167.2 million in September 2026; new buyers rather than the same traders; and uses people pay for beyond resale, such as tokenized trading cards.

What is the NFT market size in 2026?

There is no single figure. Trackers count trades on public ledgers: CryptoSlam’s total for September 2026 was $167.2 million of NFT sales, and The Block’s data put all of 2025 at about $5.5 billion. Market-research firms publish much larger “market size” figures, which are forecasts built on their own definitions and models, not counts of trades.

Is OpenSea still open?

Yes. As of October 2026, OpenSea operates OS2, the rebuilt platform it launched in 2025, which trades tokens as well as NFTs. It announced Solana NFT trading on August 31, 2026 and opened a hub for tokenized trading cards in late September 2026. In February 2025 OpenSea said the SEC’s investigation was over, with no enforcement action, and it was never charged.

Is Blur shutting down?

Partly. On October 12, 2026, Blur announced that it would retire its blur.io website on November 12, 2026, the same day its Blend lending product stops matching new loans. Blur said the marketplace protocol will remain operational on-chain. Blast, the layer-two network from the team behind Blur, announced on October 2, 2026 that it was shutting down.

Is Nifty Gateway still open?

No. Nifty Gateway, owned by Gemini since 2019, switched to withdrawals only on January 24, 2026 and closed on February 23, 2026. It later extended the deadline for withdrawals to April 23, 2026 and said it would move its metadata and media hosting to Arweave, so that NFTs minted there would keep working after the closure.

Are NFT royalties enforced now?

Mostly not on the big general marketplaces, which made creator royalties optional in 2022 and 2023; OpenSea switched off its enforcement tool, the Operator Filter, on August 31, 2023. Where enforcement exists, it lives in the token’s own rules. On Solana, Metaplex Core’s Royalties plugin can limit transfers to an allowlist of royalty-paying programs; with no rule set, royalties are advisory only.

Sources and further reading

1. The Block, “Binance winds down centralized NFT service, gives users one month to withdraw assets,” June 3, 2026 (2025 volume, 2022 peak, fourth quarter and December 2025 figures). theblock.co
2. The Block, “2026 NFTs and Gaming Outlook,” December 25, 2025 (2025 volume and chain shares). theblock.co
3. The Block, “NFT trading volume last year was the worst since 2020: DappRadar,” January 15, 2025 (DappRadar’s 2022 to 2024 figures). theblock.co
4. Decrypt, Blur’s website retirement and CryptoSlam’s September 2026 sales, October 13, 2026. decrypt.co
5. Decrypt, Nifty Gateway’s closure, January 26, 2026, updated January 27, 2026. decrypt.co
6. The Block, “Otherside land NFTs sell out in hours as Yuga Labs rakes in $317 million,” May 1, 2022. theblock.co
7. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, “SEC Charges LA-Based Media and Entertainment Co. Impact Theory for Unregistered Offering of NFTs,” press release 2023-163, August 28, 2023. sec.gov
8. Commissioners Hester M. Peirce and Mark T. Uyeda, “NFTs & the SEC: Statement on Impact Theory, LLC,” August 28, 2023. sec.gov
9. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, “SEC Charges Creator of Stoner Cats Web Series for Unregistered Offering of NFTs,” press release 2023-178, September 13, 2023. sec.gov
10. SEC and CFTC, “Application of the Federal Securities Laws to Certain Types of Crypto Assets and Certain Transactions Involving Crypto Assets,” Release No. 33-11412, March 17, 2026 (91 FR 13714). sec.gov (PDF)
11. The Block, “Proof of Attendance Protocol is shutting down after 5+ years,” August 3, 2026. theblock.co
12. Kraken, NFT marketplace closure FAQ (withdrawal-only from November 27, 2024; closed February 27, 2025). support.kraken.com
13. Solana Foundation, “Inside Solana’s Growing Market for Tokenized Cards and Physical Collectibles,” July 31, 2026, and Solana ecosystem roundups for May, June and September 2026. solana.com
14. Metaplex, Core Royalties plugin documentation. metaplex.com
15. Ryan Bethencourt, PUNKS: NFTs and the Misfits Who Made Art Ownable (2026), Chapters 9, 13 and 17 to 22 and the Epilogue, with their fact-check notes. CC BY-SA 4.0. greyarealabs.co/punks-nfts

More on Grey Area Labs

• NFTs and crypto art: the Grey Area Labs guide
• The history of NFTs, 2012 to 2026
• CryptoPunks: the complete history
• Are NFTs stored on the blockchain? Where NFT art lives (publishing November 9)
• Solana NFT history and the Solana Historical Society
• DeGods: the complete history and on-chain analysis
• The Trenches Are the Textbook: what meme coins teach us about hypercompetition

First published November 4, 2026. Figures checked October 20, 2026; closure dates and statuses are rechecked on the blur.io (November 12, 2026) and Abstract (December 15, 2026) deadlines.