The fall of the 70 million dollar myth: How NFTs are moving from auction houses to Walmart shelves
By Sanqing, Foresight News
Original title: From the 70 million dollar myth to the 9 dollar doll, are NFTs really “cool”?
On January 5, the NFT Paris developer conference, which was originally scheduled to be held in February, was suddenly cancelled. What used to be an all-night party on the banks of the Seine is now left with a cold official tweet: “The market crash hit us hard, and even with aggressive cost cuts, we are still unable to support it.”
Five years ago, digital artist Beeple's work “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” sold at Christie's for an astronomical price of $69.3 million. Then, from tens of millions of dollars worth of CryptoPunks to countless digital collectibles endorsed by mainstream institutions, it was the golden age of NFTs.
From a sky-high deal that was recorded in auction history to an industry conference that was forced to be cancelled, it took five years for NFTs to complete the complete cycle from frenzy to liquidation.
Picture - Everydays: The First 5000 Days NFT
The imbalance between supply and demand in the NFT market
Supply exploded. According to CryptoSlam data, the supply in 2025 increased by 35% compared to 1 billion in 2024. Over the past four years, the total number of NFTs has soared from 38 million to 1.34 billion, an increase of about 3,400%.
Sales are shrinking. According to CryptoSlam data, total NFT sales in 2025 were around $5.63 billion, down 37% from $8.9 billion in 2024. According to CoinGecko data, the total market value of NFTs fell from a peak of around $17 billion in April 2022 to around $2.4 billion at the end of 2025, a drop of about 86%. In 2025 alone, the total market value of NFTs shrunk from about $9.2 billion in January to the end of the year, with a drop of 68% during the year.
Liquidity is diluted. As the casting threshold was lowered, the market entered a “high frequency and low price” model. According to CryptoSlam data, the average transaction price has dropped from $124 in 2024 to $96 at the end of 2025. Compared to the average transaction price of over $400 during the peak of the bubble in 2021-2022, it has fallen by three-quarters.
Source: CryptoSlam
Even the top NFT projects and blue-chip NFTs in the past are hard to escape. In CryptoPunks, for example, the floor price has dropped to around 30 ETH, down 78% from the 2021 peak of 125 ETH; BAYC (BAYC) fell 83% to about 5 ETH from about 30 ETH; and Azuki dropped 93% to 0.8 ETH from around 12 ETH.
Platform side's collective “escape” and evolution
The movement of industry leaders marks the end of this cycle.
OpenSea, which once held the top position in the NFT market, dropped its monthly revenue from 50 million to 120 million dollars in the golden age of NFTs to less than 1 million dollars.
As a result, OpenSea announced a transformation, and the platform will transform from a simple “NFT marketplace” to a general on-chain trading center for “trade everything” (Trade Everything), covering digital assets such as physical collectibles and tokens, and confirmed that tokens will be issued.
Once at its peak, Blur's TVL continued to be at a new low, and the token price dropped 99% from its high point.
Also, Magic Eden, the founder of the Solana chain, issued coins after a year of operation. Affected by the NFT market and the implementation of bears' expectations, the platform's trading volume began to shrink, and the token price also fell by more than 98% from a high point.
Even projects that can't keep up with the changing times, such as the established NFT marketplace X2Y2, have been eliminated, completely suspended, and the team has switched to the AI field.
From “token” to “brand”
While all over the world, Pudgy Penguins Fat Penguins successfully bucked the trend and became a different kind of industry. Its success did not rely on complex innovation or short-term speculation in token technology, but rather gradually built a sustainable brand ecosystem that spans Web3 and traditional retail by transforming digital IP into physical consumer goods.
Through the dual revenue model promoted by CEO Luca Netz, Fat Penguin deeply combines IP licensing with physical products, and its physical toys have entered more than 10,000 retail channels around the world, including Walmart (Walmart), Target, and Walgreens. According to AInvest, this transformation brought the project around $50 million in annual revenue, effectively offsetting the impact of the overall contraction of the crypto market.
Picture - Pudgy Penguins toy shelf at Walmart USA
Fat Penguin spent around $500,000 to project giant animations at the Las Vegas landmark Sphere (ball) during Christmas 2025.
Figure - Pudgy Penguins image on Sphere
The ad, which targets millions of visitors, avoids crypto jargon and uses only a family-friendly IP image to reverse stimulate liquidity in the secondary market through brand exposure. Over the past 14 days, the price of this NFT floor has risen 25%, and trading volume has increased by about 33%.
This idea of shifting from speculation to cultural operation seems to be becoming the consensus of industry survivors. In May of last year, BAYC publisher Yuga Labs handed over the IP rights of the top NFT project CryptoPunks to the non-profit organization Infinite Node Foundation with the aim of decoupling it from the speculative nature of price fluctuations and seeking longer-term art preservation and cultural operation.
Physical Endorsements and Functional Regression
In addition to IP branding, NFTs are becoming an underlying tool for connecting physical assets (RWA).
Physical card transactions. The platform Courtyard.io is changing the way to play. They deposit real Pokémon cards into certified vaults and tokenize them as NFTs. Over 30 days at the end of 2025, the platform processed more than 230,000 transactions and generated approximately $12.7 million in sales, proving the strong market demand for this highly liquid, physically supported asset.
Functional tickets. FIFA (FIFA) has also joined this camp, introducing “priority purchase rights” NFTs in 2026 World Cup ticket sales. These NFTs aren't meant to be hype, but rather as a verification tool to prevent scalper premiums and price fraud in the secondary market.
What are NFTs dead and what is left
NFTs aren't “cool,” but they've actually died once.
What is dead is the fantasy of seeing NFTs as a financial asset that can be continuously minted and traded away from real value based on narrative alone. In the face of the reality of unlimited supply and limited demand, this path is bound to be unsustainable.
What remains is the role of NFTs as a kind of “credential layer.” It is no longer required to create value alone, but is embedded within IP brands, physical assets, and functional scenarios, and undertakes the basic functions of authorization, circulation, participation, and verification.
From toy shelves with fat penguins, to on-chain circulation of physical cards, to anti-scalper mechanisms for World Cup tickets, NFTs are leaving the speculative arena and returning to the toolbox.
It's certainly been a cold winter for the speculative NFT market. But for NFTs themselves, it's more like a rebirth after being fascinated.
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