It always smelled like a pyramid scheme: the only way to get rich was to buy low, hype it up, and hope you weren’t the last one holding the bag when it all crashed. The first wave cashed out. Everyone else was left asking themselves the eternal question: “Why did I ever think this PNG would be worth anything?”
If there’s a poster child for NFT stupidity, it’s the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Let’s be real: these were ugly, uninspired, derivative doodles with the artistic depth of a middle schooler’s DeviantArt page. And yet people – smart people, even – were dropping tens of thousands of dollars on them. Celebrities jumped in. Justin Bieber bought one. Paris Hilton showed one off on late-night TV. Suddenly, if you didn’t have a Bored Ape as your Twitter profile picture, you weren’t part of the “club.”
The funniest part wasn’t people paying six figures for clip-art monkeys. The funniest part was the resale market. Watching someone who bought their “unique” ape for $50,000 try to auction it off, only to get $8 in return, was comedy gold. Imagine explaining to your kids that their college fund is gone because Dad needed to flex a cartoon JPEG.
The Metaverse That Never Was
NFT hype wasn’t just about “art.” It bled into the so-called “Metaverse,” that mythical digital world where we were all supposed to buy land, build houses, and display our NFT collections for other digital rich kids to admire. Entire virtual neighborhoods sold for millions. Companies like Adidas and Nike jumped in, because apparently nothing says brand prestige like pixelated billboards in an empty sandbox.
Spoiler: nobody showed up. Daily active users for Decentraland, one of the big NFT metaverse platforms, were in the low thousands at best. Imagine buying a “prime piece of real estate” next to Snoop Dogg’s digital mansion and realizing your only neighbor is some guy named Chad in Ohio who logged in once and never came back.
Blockchain Was Never Going to Change the World
Now, don’t get me wrong – blockchain has legitimate uses. It’s a clever technology for decentralized ledgers, financial tracking, maybe even supply chain transparency. But NFTs as the “future of art, real estate, and society”? Please. That was a fever dream.
The truth is that NFTs were the biggest scam of the past few years. They didn’t democratize art. They didn’t create new economies. They didn’t build a metaverse. What they did was funnel billions into the hands of early adopters, scammers, and “projects” that were abandoned the second the hype died.
The Crash We All Saw Coming
NFTs got ‘big’ in 2021, and By 2022, NFT sales had already dropped by 90%. By 2025, 96% of collections were declared “dead.” Translation: nobody was buying, nobody was selling, and entire “communities” evaporated overnight. Those Bored Apes that once sold for six figures? Today, many are worth less than a decent pizza.
The crazy part is how we moved on. Just a few years later, most people barely even remember NFTs happened. One of the fastest bubbles in history, gone almost as quickly as it arrived.
Final Thought
For me, NFTs were always nonsense. They were never art, never real ownership, never the future of anything. They were a gold rush where the only real winners were the ones who sold their monkeys fast and got out before the collapse. Everyone else got left holding a blockchain receipt to a joke.
And honestly? That’s what makes it so funny. Not because people lost money – that sucks. But because this was all so predictable. The metaverse was a sad joke. Blockchain wasn’t going to change the world. And NFTs were just the dumbest flex of all time.
So let’s look back and laugh, because it’s either that or cry at how easily people can still be convinced to pay thousands for a cartoon ape in a sailor hat.
