Are NFTs Really Dead? Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Sells for Almost $1 Million

PLOVDIV, Bulgaria - Dec. 19, 2022 - PRLog -- The cryptocurrency market has attracted growth over the last few years, with the introduction of NFTs, Defi, and DApps built using smart contract chains like Ethereum. In the last two years, the tech to reach high mainstream traction was NFTs, but was it just a phase?

The 2021 NFT Boom

The social landscape was perfectly laid out for NFTs to explode in 2021. Millions of people worldwide had been in lockdown spending more time online, and likely stumbling upon play-2-earn (P2E) games, which operate on blockchains and use NFT tech to mint in-game assets. Additionally, high-quality NFT marketplaces began to appear including Ethereum and OpenSea - these made NFT sales much easier. Finally, mainstream celebrities including Paris Hilton and Jack Dorsey began buying NFTs.

When you add all of this into a pot, you get a society of people interested in exploring the NFT marketplace. Then, you throw in the prospects of the Metaverse, which was marketed as a digital landscape for playing with NFTs.

The 2022 Market Crash

They say, "What goes up, must come down", and that's certainly true with the NFT and crypto market. Rising costs of living and the crash of prominent crypto projects including Terra (LUNA) and FTX don't help the NFT-value case. However, the reason for the NFT valuation drop is too high to piggyback the crypto market crash. The more likely scenario is that NFTs soared so high that people felt excluded from the game.

The Sale of BAYC #232

Put simply, BAYC NFT #232 was sold on November 23rd, 2022, for 800.00 ETH ($926,288). Originally, the NFT had been bought by Deepak Thapliyal, the CEO of Chain, for an eye-watering $23.7 million. The sale comes after his business was impacted by the FTX crash, which recently filed for bankruptcy and froze withdrawals. Other celebrity BAYC owners to lose money include Justin Bieber, whose NFT depreciated by around 95%

What This Means Going Forward

There's a clear decline in NFT value, but the market certainly isn't dead. However, the exclusivity of owning NFTs is heading towards a more stable situation, but $1 million is still far too much for the average person to fork out.

Businesses understand this, which is why they're leveraging NFTs in a much more affordable way. For example, in-game NFT assets can be bought for a relatively low price and sometimes acquired for free. However, community engagement and interest in an NFT project must be generated, which is why the top marketing crypto agency (https://coinbound.io/) is on-hand to spread the word.

The Verdict

The NFT market has depreciated, but it's certainly not dead. New projects are still emerging.