Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), at their 2022 peak, created a multi-billion dollar market.
Since then, however, even the blue-chip projects have, with few exceptions, plummeted in value, backed away from promises, or been abandoned.
Indeed, looking back now and it all feels like a fever dream in which huge swaths of the industry imagined futures that never even partially materialized.
Protos looked back at 32 predictions about NFTs from various individuals to see how accurate they were.
An actual $NFT success story? Tascha Labs’ shattered diamond
Insurance, tax, and real estate NFTs
In January 2022 Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank infamy claimed, “You’re going to see a lot of movement in terms of doing authentication and insurance policies and real estate transfer taxes all online over the next few years, making NFTs a much bigger, more fluid market potentially than just bitcoin alone.”
Ask yourself, did you get your insurance policy this year in the form of a $NFT? Anyways, Bitcoin is a much larger and more liquid market than NFTs.
Cuban on collectibles and Mavericks tickets
Mark Cuban, also of Shark Tank infamy, once predicted that the collectible nature of NFTs would “completely turn the…industry upside down.”
While it’s hard to describe those industries as right-side up, it’s easy to see that NFTs haven’t transformed them.
In 2021, Cuban mentioned that the Mavericks were “trying to find a good option for turning our tickets into NFTs. We want to be able to find ways so that not only can our consumers, our fans, buy tickets and resell them, but we continue to make a royalty on them.”
Unsurprisingly, this didn’t happen, either.
Will Mark Cuban eat his words with his newest crypto prediction?
This game ‘could bring billions of users’
Michael Wagner, the founder of Star Atlas, predicted that this game, which integrates spaceship NFTs “could bring in billions of users,” according to Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up.
Star Atlas’ most recent economic report claimed that SAGE: Starbased had 2,000 monthly active users when it stopped tracking that information.
Perhaps the final game will be sufficiently impressive to onboard one out of every four people alive, something no game has ever done before.
‘Every fashion brand is going to figure out this tech’
Brian Novogratz, of Galaxy Digital, predicted, “Your healthcare records will be NFTs, every brand, every fashion brand, everyone who owns an IP, the music industry, the creative industry, is going to figure out ways to use this technology.”
Your healthcare records aren’t NFTs, not everyone has figured out ways to use this technology, and much intellectual property has never become an $NFT.
$NFT market cap headed to $80 billion?
Stephanie Wissink of Jefferies released a forecast that predicted the $NFT market-capitalization would exceed $80 billion by 2025.
The current market-capitalization is hard to get a concrete number on, but CoinGecko pins it at somewhere in the region of $1.7 billion.
GDP we’ve never even thought about!
Aleksander Larsen, the co-founder of Sky Mavis, predicted that “blockchain games” would “be a provider of jobs for hundreds of millions of people around the world” and “will create GDP for the world in a way that we have never even thought about.”
Axie Infinity, the flagship blockchain game for Sky Mavis, failed in a spectacular way, in part funding the North Korean nuclear program.
Axie Infinity bailout: Binance leads $150M funding round to fix user losses
MetaKovan claimed this artwork was worth $1 billion
Vignesh Sundaresan, who also goes by MetaKovan, purchased the Beeple piece Everydays: The First 5000 Days, and in the Christie’s press release announcing this he stated that this work was “worth $1 billion.”
We may not know what value he places on this in his heart; he has yet to resell it, but it seems unlikely that it would currently fetch $1 billion.
Do you have a parallel digital identity?
Movie star Reese Witherspoon once predicted that, “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity. Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?”
Some of this has arguably come true for some people, but her efforts to turn NFTs into TV shows and movies seem to have quietly failed.
Brian Armstrong had high hopes for NFTs
In 2021 Brian Armstrong, founder and chief executive for Coinbase, claimed that the company’s $NFT initiatives “could be as big or bigger” than its cryptocurrency-focused businesses.
Coinbase sunset its $NFT trading platform about two years ago.
Who knew Coinbase’s $NFT marketplace launch would suck this bad
Do NFTs still have a major role to play?
Tyler Winklevoss, founder and chief executive of Gemini, which acquired Nifty Gateway, once stated that “Non-fungible tokens and the digital goods (and collectibles) they enable will play a major role in the next era of the digital economy.”
Duncan Cock Foster, founder of Nifty Gateway, said “I like to think that in 10 years, everyone will be commissioning artists to create nifties to give away at a dinner party.”
That role won’t be facilitated by Nifty Gateway since it’s been shut down.
Justin Sun hails ‘spectacular’ chapter of art history
In 2021 Justin Sun launched his JUST $NFT fund and predicted, “The emergence of $NFT-backed artworks ushers $NFT-based art into a new, spectacular chapter of human art history with JUST $NFT Fund being the prologue.”
When we checked in on his $NFT platform in February, we found that it had $6/day in trading volume.
Bringing the metaverse to life worth $1 trillion
David Grinder and Matt Maximo of Grayscale Research stated that “the market opportunity for bringing the metaverse to life may be worth over $1 trillion in annual revenue.”
This has yet to happen.
Could the metaverse be worth even more?
Eric Sheridan, Goldman Sachs analyst, predicted that the metaverse “could be as much as an $8 trillion opportunity on the revenue and monetization side.”
Again, it’s yet to reach this lofty goal.
The metaverse bubble has popped — we have charts to prove it
NFTs have a role to play in social networks
In his dreadful book Read Write Own, A16z partner Chris Dixon claimed, “$NFT identifiers can play a similar role in newer social networks, letting users switch applications with their names and connections intact.”
Meanwhile, Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto for Visa, stated that “NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce.”
While in theory this may be true, in practice it does not seem to be implemented, and even X has eliminated its $NFT profile pictures.
Meta added NFTs to Instagram. But not for long
In 2022 Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta, announced that the firm would be adding NFTs to Instagram, a feature that was implemented and then removed.
He also hoped “that the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the Metaverse can be minted as an $NFT and you can take it between different places.”
This was not a feature ever implemented in the effectively abandoned Meta metaverse.
Nike probably sticking to shoes from now on
In 2021 Nike acquired RTFKT, and its chief executive stated that this acquisition was “another step that accelerates Nike’s digital transformation and allows us to serve athletes and creators at the intersection of sport, creativity, gaming and culture.”
Nike has since sold RTFKT.
Nike’s RTFKT $NFT collection is losing its images
More metaverse hype
Bob Chapek, then chief executive of Disney, stated in an internal email that the Metaverse “is the next great storytelling frontier and the perfect place to pursue our strategic pillars of Storytelling Excellence, Innovation, and Audience Focus.”
Since then, Bob Iger has replaced him as chief executive and shitcanned the metaverse work.
Autograph was going to offer NFTs but then didn’t
Tom Brady, former National Football League (NFL) quarterback, was a co-founder of Autograph, a firm that was going to offer NFTs for sports fans and eventually ended up pivoting away from NFTs before being acquired.
When is a band not a band? When it’s an $NFT ape
Universal Music believed that NFTs were the future of music, even creating a band composed of several Bored Apes.
This band never released any music, raising fascinating philosophical questions about how little music you can release and still be a “band.”
Dozens more apes gone! Millions of dollars lost in BAYC scam
$NFT: Year One didn’t last long
In 2022 Yosuke Matsuda, the president of Square Enix, was excited about the future of the metaverse and NFTs, stating that 2021 was not only “Metaverse: Year One” but was also “NFTs: Year One.”
He’s since stepped down and the firm has moved away from that strategy.
Snoop Dogg ‘doesn’t know shit’
Snoop Dogg predicted that his record label Death Row would become “a $NFT label.” It did not.
When Snoop Dogg announced his move to the Sandbox metaverse, he stated that he was “getting this money” and stated that he doesn’t “know shit.”
He did get money and thoroughly proved he does not know shit.
Snoop Dogg quits ‘smoke’ amid $NFT, edibles launch rumors
NFTs were going to be the ‘future of being social’
Heiress and entrepreneur Paris Hilton predicted that the metaverse was the “future of partying, going out, interacting with people and being social.”
Perhaps it has for her, but for me personally the metaverse has yet to fulfill that role.
Animoca CEO wide of the mark by at least $998 billion
Yat Siu, the chief executive of Animoca, predicted that the digital ownership economy would be “worth trillions.”
So far it’s lagged far below that, with CoinGecko suggesting the total $NFT marketplace is less than $2 billion.
TIME abandoned its $NFT gallery
Keith Grossman, the president of TIME, the firm behind the magazine, launched its own since-abandoned $NFT gallery where it was selling pieces to raise revenue.
EA said NFTs were the ‘future of the industry’ then stopped making them
In 2021 Andrew Wilson, the chief executive of Electronic Arts (EA) believed that NFTs were “the future of our industry,” a future that EA has stopped striving towards as it no longer produces NFTs.
Logan Paul was exposed by Coffeezilla
Logan Paul predicted that his CryptoZoo $NFT game would be a “really fun game that makes you money,” but it never launched and became the subject of a series of exposes by YouTuber Coffeezilla.
Pudgy Penguins mobile game axed after losing millions of dollars
Not everybody was wrong. Well, not completely
One of the rare successful predictions was Luca Netz, the chief executive of Pudgy Penguins, predicting that he would turn the then-failed project into “a brand that’s known both in and outside of the $NFT world.”
The degree of success may be debatable; however, it has successfully gotten derivative toys into major stores and has improved its relative position in $NFT rankings.
