So here's something I've been thinking about lately - everyone keeps saying NFTs are dead, but the reality is way more nuanced than that. Just been reading some takes from Animoca Brands leadership, and they're making a solid point about who's actually driving this market right now.

The thing is, NFTs definitely aren't dead. What's changed is the noise level and who's participating. The wealthy crypto collectors are still very much active and moving serious capital in this space. These aren't casual retail investors chasing hype - they're institutional players and high-net-worth individuals who actually understand the underlying value proposition.

Yat Siu and his team have been pretty clear about this: the market has matured past the speculative phase. The question of whether NFTs are still popular keeps coming up in casual conversations, but among serious participants, it's not really a debate anymore. The market is consolidating around actual utility and real collectors with conviction.

What's interesting is that this phase might actually be healthier for the space long-term. You're not seeing the same level of mania, which means the projects and platforms that survive are actually building something meaningful. The wealthy collectors who remain are filtering out the noise and putting capital behind projects with real fundamentals.

If you look at the data, transaction volumes might be lower than the 2021-2022 peak, but that's kind of the point. We're past the hype cycle. The collectors who are still active in NFTs today are doing it because they genuinely believe in the asset class, not because they saw a TikTok video about some random project.

So yeah, NFTs are definitely still popular - just in a different way than before. Less Instagram hype, more actual value creation. That's probably the healthiest thing that could've happened to the space.