Back in March we wrote about "crypto art" — which turned out to be the early days of what would go on to be a breakthrough year for NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which beat out "metaverse", "pingdemic" and "cheugy" for Collins Dictionary’s word of the year.
If you've managed to avoid reading about NFTs until now, we'll catch you up. The short version of the explainer is that NFTs allow you to "own" a distinct piece of media such as an image or video, that is authenticated by a blockchain to be unique or original — no matter how many times it is copied or replicated across the internet. An in-depth explainer is here.
NFT-Mania
Many remain skeptical about NFTs. Why anyone would want to pay thousands of dollars for a .JPEG that anyone can theoretically copy, save, distribute or modify can be hard to get your head around — but the volumes traded in NFTs have been significant.
Data from DappRadar shows that trading volumes in NFTs hit $300m a day in August on marketplace OpenSea, with more than 9.5 million transactions taking place so far in 2021.
Those numbers are large, but the mania seems to have cooled slightly, with average daily volumes falling to $71m in December, and active users and transaction numbers also coming down modestly. Is this the beginning of the end for NFTs? Or still just the beginning?
