Remember the days when pictures of apes cost as much as apartments in the city center? That was the peak of the hype around NFTs. Today people talk about them less, but not because the topic is dead. On the contrary, in 2025 NFTs have become part of life in other areas. Only now it’s calmer, without insane prices and frenzy.
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A Brief History of How NFTs Appeared and What They Are
An NFT is a unique digital token, a kind of electronic certificate proving that a particular virtual object belongs to you: an image, music, or even a piece of digital land in a game.
The first attempts to create such assets date back to 2017. Projects like CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties appeared back then, showing that you could own digital characters and collect them like baseball cards or stickers. That’s how a new craze began. As pioneers, CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties eventually became true legends of the NFT market.
CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties among the top NFT collections by market capitalization. Source: nftgo
Hype Boom
2020–2021 turned into real madness. People sat at home during the pandemic, cryptocurrencies were rising, and everyone was looking for new ways to make money. NFTs caught the wave: digital art, collections from brands and musicians, big-ticket auctions.
How NFT market trading volume changed. Source: The Block
Nike, Adidas, Coca-Cola, Visa — everyone wanted a piece of the pie. That’s why many popular companies launched their own NFT collections. For example, Nike released digital sneakers.
Some deals shocked the market. Here are examples of the loudest NFT sales:
Beeple’s digital artwork Everydays: The First 5000 Days — $69 million.
Token CryptoPunk 5822 — $23.7 million.
Apes from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection that sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
The Decline of Interest in NFTs
But the fairy tale ended quickly. Already in 2022, sales fell by tens of times. The market was flooded with dull collections, and the tokens had little utility. When cryptocurrencies also collapsed, investors simply left.
Even the giants couldn’t hold out: Meta ended NFT support on social networks, Ubisoft and Square Enix faced criticism from players, and brands like Nike backed away from digital clothing collections.
NFTs stopped being a mass pastime and slipped into the shadows.
NFTs in 2025
But saying the topic is dead would be wrong. NFTs have found new applications.
In games they became proof of ownership of in-game items. In Illuvium you can own unique creatures, and in The Sandbox you can buy virtual land.
In music and film, tokens grant access to exclusives. Snoop Dogg released albums and tickets to private parties through NFTs. The animated series Stoner Cats was available only to those who had a digital ticket.
In real estate, NFTs turn into documents. The company Propy has already sold apartments via tokens, and in finance gold certificates in the form of NFTs have appeared.
Collectible tokens are alive, too, but now the focus is on uniqueness, not on thousands of identical pictures. Art Blocks proves that algorithmic art can be valuable, and Louis Vuitton releases rare digital accessories for select clients.
And of course, a separate chapter is Pavel Durov’s Telegram. In 2025 he stated that the company reinvented NFTs with digital gifts. Regular gifts are just animations. Collectible digital goods can be turned into a token on the TON blockchain and resold.
A story that thundered across the market: entrepreneur Roxman traded gifts worth $57 for a Porsche 911 GT3 RS priced around $350,000. Durov is confident this is proof of the new approach’s value and a chance to revive interest.
Today NFTs are no longer hype for hype’s sake but a working technology.
Conclusions
NFTs lived through a turbulent youth when millions chased pictures for resale. Then the market overheated and crashed. But the technology remained and gradually took its place in the digital economy.
In 2025 NFTs have become part of games, music, finance, and even messengers. The mass frenzy is unlikely to return, but tokens increasingly resemble a useful tool rather than a trendy toy. Their value now lies not in hype but in the fact that they can truly prove ownership and uniqueness in the digital world.
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