The art world moves past NFTs, signaling limited future prospects despite market activity and Web3 exploration.
Christie’s the world’s largest art auction house, its shuttering its digital art division, home to many NFTs. The institution hosted a $69 million NFT auction in 2021, helping kickstart the sector’s fame.
Theoretically, the firm may continue selling NFTs in the “21st Century Art” category, but this seems unlikely.
The NFT sector took the world by storm in 2022, but the broader Web3 sector has largely moved on. Although there was a brief revival earlier this year, and the space is still exploring use cases, this is unrelated to their purported use as an art form. Christie’s, the world’s largest art auction house, is shuttering all its NFT services:
“Christie’s has made a strategic decision to reformat digital art sales. The company will continue to sell digital art within the larger 20th and 21st Century Art category,” the institution claimed in a statement.
This may seem like a minor development, but the art auction house is very key to NFT history. In 2021, Christie’s made history by selling an NFT collection for $69 million.
This largely helped trigger the technology’s rise to fame, powering the gains of 2022. Christie’s even launched an on-chain auction platform as a show of confidence.
It may be difficult to see why that confidence is gone today. Objectively, NFTs aren’t performing much worse than they have been in 2023 or 2024. For one, the top NFT collections’ trading volume increased by nearly 90% in the last 24 hours. The sector’s most recent peak is smaller than in 2024, but it’s not a significant drop.
Unfortunately, though, stats like that are irrelevant to NFTs’ place in the art world. Years ago, serious artists heralded them as an important future for digital art, and famous creators have launched their own collections on many occasions.
In 2025, though, this use case has apparently fallen out of favor. Simply put, the art world has moved on.
Decisions like this are key “intangibles” in the market, and investors shouldn’t take them lightly. Would NFTs have ever taken off if major institutions like Christie’s didn’t think they were legitimate art? If the exact same organizations have lost their faith in NFTs, who will keep it alive?
This development may serve as a canary in the coal mine. The NFT sector isn’t dead yet, but its oldest friends are abandoning it. Although it may linger on for quite some time, a full return to the limelight seems unlikely.
