What is driving people to buy NFTs? To date, the most expensive NFT sold is Pak’s ‘The Merge’ which sold for $91.8 million. People are getting in on the NFT mania and investing anywhere from a few hundred dollars to millions. Crypto art investors say it is a combination of a few factors which include the pandemic and surge in bitcoin.
CEO of VaynerMedia and investor, Gary Vaynerchuk told CoinDesk that while he believes NFTs are operating in a bubble, that doesn’t mean they don’t have any staying power.
“A lot of people talked about the internet being a fad,” Vaynerchuk said. “In reality, the internet was this game-changing revolution of technology, but a lot of the early projects were just overpriced on the excitement.”
Some experts think the NFT boom was accelerated by the pandemic, however, this was inevitable because the tech-hungry younger generations would have eventually driven the wave anyway.
Beeple is the most high-profile NFT artist to make a gigantic sale ($69 million), but there is a new crop of illustrators, graphic and video artists selling work at soaring prices.
Realistically speaking, the frenzy has subsided a bit. NonFungible reports the average price of an NFT has decreased since February 2021 from $4,000 to about $1,500. The average daily sales volume of NFTs fell from $19.3 million in mid-March 2021 to $3.03 million by April of the same year.
Early investors, buyers, collectors, artists, and true blockchain believers have done supremely well. Collectors who bought NFTs have suddenly become multi-millionaires.
NFT collector Eric Young told Bloomberg magazine that he started buying NFTs because he was “curious and it made intuitive sense” to him. Young bought his first bitcoin in 2015 and transitioned to collecting around 350 NFTs with an investment of $1 million. Two in his collection were Mad Dog Jones costing a total of $700 and he later sold them for $240,000.
As portfolios increase and the art collector mindset expands, NFT projects have flooded the metaverse. The crypto-rich is growing and they remain active to spot, collect and flip NFTs for a tremendous profit.
