The Rise And Fall Of NFTs: What Went Wrong?

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image sourced from https://queue-it.com/blog/nft-ideas-for-inspiration/

I wanted to review this article because it felt pertinent to my research in a couple different facets. NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens) “are unique digital tokens, typically bought with cryptocurrency, representing ownership of a specific item or piece of content, such as digital art, music, or videos” (McGimpsey, 2024). They had a meteoric rise in the public sphere in 2021 and were held as a sign of wealth or exclusivity for that short term. These were items that people invested a good a mount of money into, and they started conversations about the ‘artistic value’ and overall digital art world that hadn’t been talked about before. The NFT also had a rapid decline in value in the public sphere after their quick emergence in 2021, and I was curious about the decline and what can be learned from it, and what the future of NFT’s is.

Although the NFT market may not be a viable one for long term financial growth I believe there is a lot that can be learned from their space in the digital market. The digital art world has been changed a lot by the insertion of NFT’s. At the end of the article McGimpsey mentions that although NFTs have “faced significant challenges” but that the future market needs to focus on “practical applications, greater stability” and “sustainable growth” (2024). I found it interesting that in some cases “original NFTs have become akin to collectible art in the traditional sense—valued for their place in the history of the medium and their scarcity” (McGimpsey, 2024). Showing that, in some ways, the digital space can have similar value to ‘real world’ physical items. In moving forward from this article I believe there is space to see how ‘new’ and flashy markets such as NFTs can have great impact on how art is perceived. Where NFTs failed is where they didn’t have a forward facing plan, and that hindered the positive affects they could have had on the industry. How can design use the valuation of scarce digital artifacts to have a forward facing plan of stability and sustainable growth?

Source

McGimpsey, P. (2024a, January 31). The rise and fall of nfts: What went wrong?. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/au/investing/cryptocurrency/are-nfts-dead/