The reason for translating this text is because NFT discussions have been heating up overseas lately, while the Chinese community has remained relatively indifferent. Additionally, I’ve recently developed a strong appreciation for Doodles. OK, let’s dive into the main content👇

The majority of people in the crypto space believe NFTs are dead.

The majority in the art world consider NFTs a scam—briefly fooling some Hollywood figures and a Singaporean crypto founder before vanishing into obscurity.

Then there’s a third group—the loudest one—who have repeated the same three sentences for four years straight:

If you’ve been online since 2021, you’ve heard these three statements. Maybe you’ve even said one yourself.

All of them are wrong—and the data proves it so loudly that I’m genuinely baffled why no one is shouting it out.

The traditional art market reached $59.6 billion in 2025, up 4% from the previous year, but still below its peak of $67.8 billion in 2022.

The NFT market currently stands at around $2 billion, down approximately 90% from its peak.

On the surface, you’d say, “Yes, NFTs lost.” But surfaces are exactly where you shouldn’t look, because the entire art world—museums, blue-chip galleries, auction houses, the most serious living collectors—has quietly built infrastructure for something they publicly declared dead over the past four years.

This isn’t a “moonshot” article. I won’t tell you your favorite PFP’s floor price is about to surge 50x. Instead, I’ll show you:

What gatekeepers in the art world have already done while everyone was fixated on price charts

Why every truly significant art movement was mocked for decades before being recognized

Why the math—actual mathematical calculations—renders the bearish argument indefensible

Bookmark this if needed. By the end, you’ll understand why I believe buying generational digital art at these prices represents one of the most asymmetric bets across any asset class today.

This isn’t an article about prices. It’s about an ownership system the world hasn’t yet priced.

Let’s begin.

One: What You Thought Was Immutable Is Actually Shrinking

The traditional art market is valued at $59.6 billion. This figure comes from the Basel Art Show and UBS 2026 report, authored by Dr. Claire McAndrew, who has been the most respected analyst in this field for over a decade.

Sounds massive. Massive by NFT standards, indeed. But here’s a fact no one tells you:

It’s down from its 2022 peak of $67.8 billion, following two consecutive years of decline before a minor rebound.

The middle segment of the market (works under $50,000) has been collapsing for over a decade.

In public auctions, works priced above $1 million account for less than 1% of lots but represent 54% of total value.

The Basel Art Show report itself flags the most important upcoming shift: "A massive wealth transfer." Over $80 trillion in assets will move from the baby boomer generation to their children and grandchildren within the next twenty years.

Read that 1% statistic again. The traditional art market isn’t really a $600 billion market. It’s a $300 billion mass-market segment, plus a $300 billion high-end casino where billionaires trade Basquiat and Picasso works as tax-efficient tools for capital transfer across legacies.

And there’s a problem at the top. Buyers are aging. Dealers are aging. Infrastructure is aging. The children and grandchildren inheriting $80 trillion weren’t raised bidding on Sotheby’s catalogs.

They grew up online.

So before we talk about NFTs, clarify this: the market NFTs supposedly compete with isn’t a thriving, expanding one.

It’s an aging market. A concentration problem. An intergenerational handover to people who don’t want what’s being passed down. And this is what people call a “safe” asset class.

At the top, older collectors are increasingly focused on estate management, liquidity, and inheritance—not discovering new media.

Now let me show you what those in charge are actually doing with their own money.

Two: Gatekeepers Have Already Acted While You Weren’t Looking

The art world has a very specific mechanism for legitimizing new media. Here’s how it works:

This is the script. It applies to photography. To video art. To installation art. To every medium the art world initially dismissed as “not real art.”

And this is precisely the script running right now for digital and on-chain art. Most people don’t realize the early phase has already happened.

Here are works already in major museum permanent collections:

MoMA (New York)—In 2023, MoMA acquired Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised. It was displayed in the main hall for nearly a full year. Three million visitors saw it. The collection includes a companion NFT and a blockchain commemorative mint available to visitors. That same year, MoMA also acquired Ian Cheng’s 3FACE, a generative NFT that reads wallet contents and evolves as wallets change. This is conceptual art that literally cannot exist without the blockchain.

Centre Pompidou (Paris)—France’s premier modern art museum acquired 18 NFT works by 13 artists in 2023. The collection includes a CryptoPunk, an Autoglyph, works by Sarah Meyohas, Raphaël Rosso, and John Gerrard. The curator, Marcela Lista, positioned this acquisition as a natural extension of the museum’s existing collections of Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, Vito Acconci, and Nam June Paik. NFTs were integrated into that lineage, not opposed to it.

LACMA (Los Angeles)—Home to one of the most serious on-chain art collections in the world. In February 2023, collector Cozomo de’ Medici donated 22 generative and blockchain-based works, including a CryptoPunk, a Ringer by Dmitri Cherniak, and works by Taylor Hobbs—the largest blockchain art donation ever received by any American museum. Additionally, Eric Calderon, founder of Art Blocks, directly donated the final Chromie Squiggle, the origin piece of the entire on-chain generative art movement, to the museum. LACMA also operates the first dedicated digital art fund for female artists in any American museum.

I know that’s a lot of museums. Please keep listening. The point isn’t any single one—it’s the pattern.

ICA Miami—The earliest adopter. They received CryptoPunk #5293 from a trustee, making it the first NFT ever collected by any major museum—literally the first. In 2022, Yuga Labs gifted them a second Punk and launched the Punks Legacy Project, a formal initiative to place CryptoPunks in major global museums.

Whitney Museum—Has quietly collected digital and net art for years, including two works by Raphael Rosso in their permanent collection. They’ve operated Artport, a digital exhibition platform, since 2001.

Buffalo AKG Art Museum—Hosted the “Peer-to-Peer” exhibition at the end of 2022, the first blockchain art survey exhibition held by any American museum. The curatorial argument presented is worth remembering: In 1910, the same museum hosted the first photography exhibition in any American museum. At that time, photography wasn’t considered art—four-quarters of a century after its invention.

Guggenheim Museum—Displayed Jenny Holzer’s Light in 2024, a 900-foot scrolling LED installation fused with AI-generated text. The Guggenheim explicitly bringing AI-assisted digital practices into its rotunda is part of the same wave.

When you combine the Centre Pompidou, MoMA, LACMA, ICA Miami, Whitney, Buffalo AKG, and Guggenheim, you get the institutional backbone of contemporary art in the US and Europe—they’ve all made formal commitments to digital and on-chain art over the past four years.

Those who ignore it will tell you institutions don’t care.

Institutions have acted publicly. The market just ignored it because floor prices dropped.

Three: Every Art Movement You Now Take Seriously Was Once a Joke

This is the part of the argument that crypto natives skip but art insiders instinctively grasp.

In 1863, the Paris Salon—the official, government-approved annual exhibition determining what counted as legitimate art—rejected over 2,000 paintings. The number of rejected works was so large, the outcry so intense, that Napoleon III ordered a parallel exhibition called the Salon des Refusés. People flocked to it—but came to mock. Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe was central to the rejected works. Critics dismissed it as vulgar and embarrassing.

Today, that painting is considered one of the foundational works of modern art. It hangs in the Musée d’Orsay. If sold, its value would be a number too absurd to write down.

In 1874, eleven years after the Salon des Refusés, a group of artists who had given up trying to enter the official salon held their own exhibition in a borrowed studio in Paris. The exhibition attracted around 3,500 visitors. The official salon drew over 500,000. A critic named Louis Leroy ridiculed Monet’s title for one painting—Impression, Sunrise—and used the term “Impressionism” as an insult.

The name stuck. They kept the insult.

Not until 1987—over a century after the Salon des Refusés—did a Van Gogh painting break the record for any modern artwork, surpassing prices previously reserved for Old Masters. Starry Night sold at Christie’s for nearly $40 million.

Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. Today, his works routinely exceed $100 million at auction.

This gap is how every art revolution looks—every time, without exception.

The lesson isn’t that recognition always takes a century. The lesson is that mockery usually comes first, institutional acceptance follows, then market re-pricing.

Take Pop Art. In July 1962, Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition, Campbell’s Soup Cans, opened at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Next door, another gallery displayed actual Campbell’s Soup cans in a window, labeled “Authentic, 29 cents,” as a public mockery. Five of the thirty-two paintings sold. Eventually, gallery owner Irving Blum bought back the entire set for $1,000.

That set of thirty-two soup cans is now among MoMA’s most treasured holdings. Individual canvases from the series have privately sold for over $9 million.

The grocery store was forgotten.

Take Conceptual Art. In 1967, Sol LeWitt published his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art in Artforum. Opening line: “Ideas become the machine that makes the art.” Most of the art world saw this as fringe philosophy. Early conceptual artists deliberately created non-collectible works—protocols, instructions, certificates—as critiques of the gallery system. They sought to escape the market.

Sol LeWitt’s auction record now exceeds $1.6 million. His wall drawings—literally just sets of instructions executed by others—are present in every major museum worldwide.

Wall drawings are conceptually smart contracts. Someone wrote the rules. Others ran them. “Art” exists in the protocol.

He invented the framework for on-chain generative art fifty years ago.

Now look at how long each took. This is what should make you sit up:

Impressionism—from rejection in 1863 to the first modernist record-breaking auction in 1987. 124 years.

Pop Art—from the grocery store mockery in 1962 to entering MoMA’s permanent collection by the late 1960s. About fifty years to reach millions in resale value.

Conceptual Art—from the 1967 manifesto to the first million-dollar auction in the 2000s. Roughly thirty-five years.

NFT Art—most consider the first NFT, Quantum, minted in 2014. CryptoPunks launched by Matt Hall and John Watkinson in 2017. Christie’s first major NFT art auction in 2021. Seven years.

Seven years.

Impressionism held eight exhibitions before the world even knew how to name them. The first wave of NFT artists are still working. Most are alive. Most are mid-career. And the same script that priced Manet, Van Gogh, Warhol, and LeWitt is already running behind the scenes for them.

Impressionism took decades to go from ridicule to billions in market value. Conceptual Art faced the same resistance.

The pattern is: a new medium emerges, the establishment denies it, creators and collectors reach critical mass, institutions follow, then capital floods in.

NFTs are simply further along that curve than most realize.

He’s talking about wall drawings. He could have been describing smart contracts.

Four: Blue-Chip Galleries Have Already Voted

If you want to know which artists will be considered classics in twenty years, don’t look at auction prices. Look at which galleries signed them.

The blue-chip gallery system—Pace, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner—controls who gets museum exhibitions, institutional placements, and ultimately who enters the canon.

These galleries are the most conservative participants in the art world. They sign artists they expect to matter in fifty years. Their entire business is providing reputation insurance for collectors holding works across generations. So when they act, it means something.

Pace Gallery was founded in 1960 and represents the estates of Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg, and Sol LeWitt himself.

Sol LeWitt. The artist most closely aligned with the conceptual lineage from which NFT art emerged.

Pace launched a dedicated NFT and Web3 platform called Pace Verso in November 2021. Since then, they’ve released NFT projects with renowned stars from their roster:

Jeff Koons (sculpture sent to the moon)

Maya Lin

Trevor Paglen

teamLab

DRIFT

Tara Donovan

Lucas Samaras

John Gerrard

Lois Hovell

Leo Villareal

Random International

Read that list. These aren’t crypto-native artists. These are established contemporary art stars releasing their first NFTs through top-tier blue-chip galleries.

Then in March 2023, Pace did something more compelling. They gave Taylor Hobbs—a generative artist born and raised in the on-chain art world—an individual exhibition in their flagship New York space. Twelve large-scale paintings derived from his QQL algorithm were shown in the same room once occupied by Rothko and Calder.

The QQL mint pass sold for $17 million the previous September. One month later, during a brutal crypto bear market, its secondary market reached $28 million.

Pace Gallery hosting an individual exhibition for a generative NFT artist isn’t a publicity stunt. It’s a vote.

And Pace isn’t alone:

Lehmann Maupin became the first commercial gallery to accept cryptocurrency payments.

Hauser & Wirth exhibited Jenny Holzer’s NFT-related works.

Gagosian accepts cryptocurrency sales.

Sotheby’s launched its dedicated metaverse marketplace in 2021, since completing over $100 million in NFT sales, while maintaining chain-based royalties at a time when most markets abandoned them.

Christie’s launched Christie’s 3.0 in October 2022—the first fully on-chain auction platform from a traditional auction house.

Auction houses and blue-chip galleries don’t need to do this. They have enough business without crypto. They’re doing it because the smartest minds in the most conservative corners of the art world have reviewed the data and concluded this is where collecting will happen over the next twenty-five years.

Five: Receipts

Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) produced a digital drawing every day for over thirteen years. He posted them online. Almost no one cared. He had a small following, no gallery representation, no museum interest, no standing in the traditional art world.

Then in March 2021, Christie’s auctioned a single file combining all 5,000 of his drawings. It sold for $69.3 million. He’s Beeple.

Now let me gather all the rest of the data in one place so you can see it clearly.

Beeple, Everydays: The First 5000 Days—sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s in March 2021. This was the first purely digital NFT artwork offered by a major auction house, instantly making Beeple the third most expensive living artist by auction record.

Pak, The Merge—generated $91.8 million in 2021, arguably the highest publicly reported sales total for any living artist, though the comparison is controversial due to the work being sold in multiple units.

Beeple, HUMAN ONE—sold for $29 million at Christie’s in November 2021. A mixed physical-digital sculpture with dynamic NFT components.

Dmitri Cherniak, Ringers #879 (“Goose”)—sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s in June 2023, deep in the bear market. Second-highest auction price ever for generative art. The full Sotheby’s GRAILS auction that day brought in roughly $11 million and set eight new artist records. This wasn’t hype money from 2021. This was belief money during the crypto winter of 2023.

Taylor Hobbs, Fidenza #725—sold for over $1 million at Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Sale in May 2023, five times its high estimate.

XCOPY, Right-Click Save As Guy—sold for approximately $7 million on SuperRare in late 2021. Multiple works by him have crossed the multi-million dollar threshold.

Refik Anadol—beyond MoMA’s collection, he became the first artist to project onto the exterior of the Las Vegas Sphere in September 2023, staying for four months. Before that, his works were projected at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Casa Batlló, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. He was Google’s first resident artist in 2016.

These aren’t isolated outliers. They’re a category.

There is now a meaningful cohort of active digital artists with seven- and eight-figure auction records, museum collections across three continents, and representation by the top galleries in contemporary art.

This group didn’t exist five years ago.

The hype vanished. The infrastructure didn’t. And those building it won’t wait for you to catch up.

Six: The New Medici Family Is Already Collecting

If you want to know what a future market for an asset class looks like, find those accumulating during bear markets.

One collector calls himself Cozomo de’ Medici. That name isn’t coincidental.

The original Medici family funded Botticelli, Michelangelo, Donatello—when those names weren’t proven and the medium was new. The returns on those bets, looked forward, were essentially infinite.

The Medici understood, at a time when no one else did, that the medium was changing—and those who arrived first would shape the canon.

Cozomo de’ Medici donated 22 generative artworks to LACMA in February 2023. The literal Medici reference is the entire argument. They’re betting on-chain art will be remembered like the Florentine Renaissance.

And they’re not alone:

Punk6529—anonymous collector who bought “Goose” for $6.2 million. Operates a museum district in the metaverse showcasing over 2,000 works. Personal collection valued at over hundreds of millions at its peak. Has consistently written publicly that NFTs aren’t trades—they’re a new system for owning digital culture.

Flamingo DAO—formed in October 2020, a collective of about 100 members pooling capital. They hold the only complete set of attributes for CryptoPunks. They hold the full Autoglyphs collection. They own an alien Punk purchased for ~$750,000 in 2021, now worth several million. Peak portfolio valuation: $1 billion.

PleasrDAO—bought the only surviving Wu-Tang Clan album from the US government for $4 million, previously seized from Martin Shkreli. Purchased Edward Snowden’s Stay Free NFT for millions. Bought the original Doge meme NFT and fractionalized it. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

These aren’t retail speculators or random buyers. They’re collectors and collectives with sufficient capital, conviction, and cultural literacy to continue buying after the hype faded—viewing NFT collecting as a sustainable thesis.

Add anonymous institutional collectors, family offices quietly accumulating assets, and Christie’s now seeing enough on-chain bidding to justify a dedicated platform—what you get doesn’t match the public narrative of “NFTs are dead.”

NFTs are accumulating. They’re just doing so among those who don’t post portfolios daily on Twitter.

The Medici reference is the entire transaction:

Find the medium institutions will want to collect in the future, before institutions know they want it, and buy foundational works when they’re still cheap relative to their ultimate importance.

This is what the original Medici family did.

This is what Cozomo Medici, Punk6529, Flamingo DAO, and PleasrDAO are doing now.

Seven: Redefining

If you’ve read this far, you already know where this is going. But let me make it undeniable.

The traditional art market is shrinking, concentrating, and aging. Its primary buyers are old. Its infrastructure was built for a generation that didn’t grow up online. The next generation—growing up online—is about to inherit $80 trillion.

Several of the most important contemporary art institutions in the US and Europe have formally committed to digital and on-chain art.

Every major art movement in the past 150 years was mocked for decades before being taken seriously. Depending on where you start counting, NFT art has only existed for 7 to 12 years. We’re at 1874, not 1987.

Blue-chip galleries have voted. Pace gave Taylor Hobbs a solo exhibition. Sotheby’s runs a dedicated digital art platform. Christie’s operates a fully on-chain auction venue.

Auction prices exist. Beeple $69.3 million. Pak $91.8 million. Cherniak $6.2 million in the depths of the bear market. Anadol projecting on the Las Vegas Sphere.

Collectors are accumulating. Flamingo, PleasrDAO, 6529, Cozomo, and unknown family offices.

This is the misunderstanding most people have about NFTs.

They think it’s a trading category. It’s not. It’s an ownership system. Before NFTs, digital culture had infinite distribution and zero ownership. Everything spread, nothing could be truly held, and all value flowed to platforms, not creators or collectors.

NFTs reversed this. Culture can now be infinitely distributed and simultaneously scarce.

This is the crucial part. Art has always been priced on three things—provenance, story, and cultural relevance—and on-chain ownership doesn’t replace any of them.

It upgrades all three.

On-chain art with social consensus scarcity is the new scarce land. Those accumulating it now are doing exactly what every generation of serious collectors has done when a new medium becomes important.

Here’s the singular thing locking the entire argument:

On-chain art is the first major art category where ownership history can be programmed, public, and timestamped from the beginning.

It doesn’t solve all problems—copyright, storage, authorship, and cultural value remain vital—but it solves provenance better than the traditional art market ever did.

The traditional art market loses billions annually to forgeries, lost provenance, and disputed attributions. New York’s Knoedler Gallery—America’s oldest gallery, 165 years old—sold $80 million in fake Rothkos and Pollocks before closing in 2011. Even Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, sold for $450 million at Christie’s, was officially marked “attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, though disputed.”

On-chain art has none of these issues. Provenance is the medium. Every prior owner is verifiable. Every transaction has a timestamp. Every smart contract is auditable.

For the first time in history, an artwork and its complete ownership history are the same object—in mathematics.

You can right-click save a JPEG. You can’t right-click save provenance. That’s the whole game.

This is Sol LeWitt’s 1967 Dematerialization, finally completed.

Thought is the machine. The machine makes art. The chain remembers everything.

If you actually plot the data—museum collections, auction records, gallery representation, collector base, historical timelines, succession demographics, structural issues in traditional markets, and the property rights advantages of on-chain provenance—there’s no honest interpretation that believes NFT art will stay at $2 billion.

$2 billion is the current market cap of an asset class with:

The world’s most prestigious museums collecting its foundational works

The world’s most conservative galleries signing its artists

The world’s most sophisticated collectors quietly accumulating

The cleanest provenance system ever invented

Trillions in generational windfalls about to fall into buyers who’ve spent their lives on screens

The bet isn’t on price. The bet is on medium.

And the medium has already won the only important argument: institutions have decided what counts as art.

The serious part of NFT art has survived the speculative collapse and is being institutionalized faster than most hated art movements in history.

Bearish views claim NFTs are dead because the speculative market collapsed.

But institutional records say otherwise: speculation died, but the medium survived.

I’m not saying every PFP will come back. Most won’t. That doesn’t mean every 2021 collection matters. Most don’t. It means foundational on-chain art is being classified, collected, contextualized, and canonized in real time.

The trade isn’t “NFTs are back.”

The trade is that digital art is entering art history—and most people are still pricing it like a dead retail mania.

In 1965, you could buy a Warhol for the price of a used car. Today, those same paintings sell for nine figures. The pricing of foundational digital art today is exactly what Warhol’s pricing was in 1965. Not a theoretical observation. A number you can look up.

The Salon mocked Manet. The grocery store mocked Warhol. Those mocking Beeple, Anadol, Hobbs, and Cherniak sound exactly like those who mocked every new medium before it hardened into art history.

History is consistent in showing who looks foolish in such exchanges.

You’ve now read 4,000 words explaining which side you’re on.

The only remaining question is whether you act before those who haven’t read this article do.

Original Author: @vangoyaa

Original Translation: @Xuegaogx