People keep asking me if NFTs are actually dead, and honestly the narrative is way more nuanced than the headlines suggest. Yeah, we're nowhere near those $1 billion monthly sales peaks from 2021/22, but saying NFTs are dead completely misses what's happening right now.

Yat Siu from Animoca Brands just made an interesting point at the CfC St. Moritz conference about this. The market's definitely cooled down, but wealthy collectors are still very much active. Monthly sales are hovering around $300 million, which is a massive drop from the peak but hardly a graveyard. The thing is, people don't realize we're looking at a completely different buyer profile now.

Think about it like this: five years ago the NFT market literally didn't exist. So even at $300 million monthly, we're talking about a market that went from zero to something substantial. The collectors who are actually participating now aren't the get-rich-quick crowd anymore. These are people with serious money who view digital assets the same way they'd view a Picasso or a rare Ferrari.

Siu himself mentioned his NFT portfolio is down roughly 80%, but here's the key insight - he wasn't flipping these. These are long-term holdings for people who genuinely believe in the asset class. You see billionaires like Adam Weitsman openly buying Otherdeed lands and Bored Apes, which tells you something about where serious capital is flowing.

Now, the whole NFT Paris cancellation got people talking about whether NFTs are dead again. But that's actually more about France's regulatory environment than the market itself. The country went from being crypto-friendly to pretty hostile, and there's been a real security concern with kidnappings of crypto executives in the region. The event didn't die because NFTs are dead - it died because the political and security landscape shifted.

The real story here is that NFTs aren't dead, they're just different now. The speculative phase ended, but the genuine collectors and believers are still here building. All the data is on-chain too, so you can literally see what's happening if you look at the transactions. The market's smaller but arguably more sustainable than it was during the hype cycle.