The reason for translating this text is because NFT discussions have been heating up overseas recently, while the Chinese community has shown relatively little response. Additionally, I've developed a strong appreciation for Doodles lately. OK, let's get started👇

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

The vast 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 at any point since 2021, you’ve heard these three statements. You might have 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 from the rooftops.

The traditional art market reached $59.6 billion in 2025, up 4% year-on-year, but still below its peak of $6.78 billion in 2022.

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

On the surface, you’d look at these numbers and say, "Yes, NFTs lost." But the surface is precisely where you shouldn’t be looking—because the entire art world—museums, blue-chip galleries, auction houses, the most serious living collectors—has been quietly building infrastructure for something they publicly declared dead over the past four years.

This is not an article about “moonshots.” 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 you need to. By the end, you’ll understand why I believe buying generational digital art at current prices represents one of the most asymmetric bets across any asset class today.

This isn’t an article about price. It’s an article about a property rights system the world hasn’t yet priced.

Let’s begin.

One: The Market You Think Is Immutable Is Actually Shrinking

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

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

It’s down from its 2022 peak of $6.78 billion—after two consecutive years of decline, followed by a modest rebound.

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

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

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

Re-read that 1% statistic. The traditional art market isn’t really a $600 billion market. It’s a $300 billion mass market, plus a $300 billion casino at the top—where billionaires trade works by Basquiat and Picasso as tax-efficient tools for capital transfer between inheritances.

And there’s a problem at the top: buyers are aging. Dealers are aging. Infrastructure is aging. The children and grandchildren set to inherit $80 trillion didn’t grow up bidding in Sotheby’s catalogs.

They grew up online.

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

It’s an aging market. A concentration problem. A generational handover to those who don’t want what’s being passed on. And this is called 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 running it are actually doing with their own money.

Two: Gatekeepers Have Already Acted While You Were Looking Away

The art world has a very specific mechanism for legitimizing new media. It goes like this:

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 exactly the script currently running 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) — Acquired Refik Anadol’s *Unsupervised* in 2023. Installed in the main hall for nearly a full year. Nearly three million visitors saw it. The collection includes a companion NFT and a blockchain commemorative mint available to visitors. Also in 2023, MoMA acquired Ian Cheng’s *3FACE*, a generative NFT that reads wallet contents and evolves with changes in ownership. This is conceptual art that literally cannot exist without blockchain.

Centre Pompidou (Paris) — France’s most important 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, Marcella Lista, positioned this acquisition as a natural continuation of the museum’s existing holdings of Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, Vito Acconci, and Nam June Paik. NFTs are integrated into that lineage, not opposed to it.

LACMA (Los Angeles) — Home to one of the world’s most serious on-chain art collections. In February 2023, collector Cozomo de' Medici donated 22 generative and blockchain-based works, including a CryptoPunk, a Ringer by Dmitri Cherniaev, and pieces by Taylor Hobbs—making it 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 work of the entire on-chain generative art movement—to the museum. LACMA also operates the first dedicated digital art fund in any American museum focused exclusively on female artists.

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

ICA Miami — Pioneered earlier than anyone else. 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 Raphaël 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 ever held by a U.S. museum. The curatorial thesis worth remembering: In 1910, the same museum hosted the first photography exhibition in any American institution. At that time, photography wasn’t considered art—four-quarters of a century after its invention.

Guggenheim Museum — Showed Jenny Holzer’s *Lights*, a 900-foot scrolling LED installation incorporating AI-generated text. Guggenheim explicitly bringing AI-assisted digital practice 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 America 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’re Taking Seriously Now Was Once a Joke

This is the part that crypto natives skip over and art insiders instinctively understand.

In 1863, the Paris Salon—the official, government-sanctioned annual exhibition determining what counts as legitimate art—rejected over 2,000 paintings. Too many rejections provoked such outrage that Napoleon III ordered a parallel exhibition called the Salon des Refusés. People flocked—but came to mock. Manet’s *Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe* was central to the rejected works; critics dismissed it as vulgar and embarrassing.

That painting is now considered one of the foundational works of modern art. It hangs in the Musée d’Orsay. If sold today, 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 about 3,500 visitors. The official Salon drew over 500,000. A critic named Louis Leroy mocked Monet’s title—*Impression, Sunrise*—and coined the term “Impressionism” as an insult.

The name stuck. They kept the insult.

It wasn’t until 1987—over a century after the Salon des Refusés—that a Van Gogh painting broke the record for any modern artwork, surpassing prices previously reserved for Old Masters. *Sunflowers* sold at Christie’s for nearly $40 million.

Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. Today, his works regularly sell for over $100 million at auction.

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

The lesson isn’t that recognition always takes a century. The lesson is that mockery usually comes first, institutional adoption 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. A neighboring gallery placed real Campbell’s soup cans in their window, labeled “Authentic – 29 cents,” as public mockery. Five out of 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 one of MoMA’s most treasured holdings. Individual canvases from the series have privately sold for over $9 million.

The grocery store is forgotten.

Take Conceptual Art. In 1967, Sol LeWitt published his *Paragraphs on Conceptual Art* in *Artforum*. Opening line: “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” The art world largely dismissed 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 a set 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 before it existed.

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

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

Pop Art — From grocery store mockery in 1962 to inclusion in MoMA’s permanent collection by the late 1960s. About 50 years to millions in resale.

Conceptual Art — From manifesto in 1967 to first million-dollar auction in the early 2000s. Roughly 35 years.

NFT Art — Most people consider *Quantum*, the first NFT, 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 generation of NFT artists are still working. Most are alive. Most are still 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: new medium emerges, establishment denies it, creators and collectors reach critical mass, institutions follow, then capital floods in.

NFTs are simply moving 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 in the canon 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 remain important in 50 years. Their entire business is providing reputation insurance to collectors holding works across generations. So when they act, it means something.

Pace Gallery was founded in 1960, representing 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 notable stars on their roster:

Jeff Koons (sculpture sent to the moon)

Maya Lin

Trevor Paglen

teamLab

DRIFT

Tara Donovan

Lucas Samaras

John Gerrard

Lois Hovell

Léo Villareal

Random International

Read that list. These aren’t crypto-native artists. These are major stars of contemporary art launching 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—a solo exhibition in their flagship New York space. Twelve large-scale paintings derived from his QQL algorithm were displayed 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 hit $28 million.

Pace Gallery’s solo 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, completing over $100 million in NFT sales since, while maintaining chain-of-ownership 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 by a traditional auction house.

Auction houses and blue-chip galleries don’t have to do this. They have enough business without crypto. They do it because the smartest minds in the most conservative corners of the art world have examined the data and concluded: this is where collecting will happen over the next 25 years.

Five: Receipts

Mike Winkelmann created 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 containing all 5,000 drawings stitched together. It sold for $69.3 million. He goes by Beeple.

Now let me gather 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. The first purely digital NFT artwork offered by a major auction house. Made Beeple instantly the third most expensive living artist by auction record.

Pak, *Merge* — Generated $91.8 million in 2021, arguably the highest-ever public sales total for a living artist, though the comparison is controversial due to the piece being sold in multiple units.

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

Dmitri Cherniaev, Ringers #879 (“Goose”) — Sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s in June 2023, deep in the bear market. The second-highest auction price ever for a generative artwork. The full Sotheby’s GRAILS sale that day brought in about $11 million and set eight new artist records. Not hype money from 2021. This was belief money during crypto winter.

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 Guy* — Sold for ~$7 million on SuperRare at the end of 2021. His multiple works have crossed the multi-million dollar threshold.

Refik Anadol — Beyond MoMA’s collection, became the first artist to project onto the exterior of the Las Vegas Sphere in September 2023, with a four-month residency. Prior to that, his work had been projected at the 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 are 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 top galleries in the contemporary art world.

This group didn’t exist five years ago.

Hype is gone. Infrastructure remains. And those building it won’t wait for you to catch up.

Six: The New Medici Family Is Already Collecting

If you want to see what the 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 yet proven, and the medium was new. The returns on those bets, looked forward, were essentially infinite.

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

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

And they’re not alone:

Punk6529 — The anonymous collector who bought the “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 — A collective of about 100 members formed in October 2020, pooling capital. Holds the only complete set of attributes for CryptoPunks. Owns the full Autoglyphs collection. Holds an alien Punk purchased for ~$750,000 in 2021, now worth several million. Peak portfolio valuation: $1 billion.

PleasrDAO — Purchased the only existing Wu-Tang Clan album for $4 million from the U.S. federal government, previously seized from Martin Shkreli. Bought Edward Snowden’s *Stay Free* NFT for over millions. Acquired the original Doge meme NFT and fragmented it. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

These aren’t retail speculators or random buyers. They are collectors and collectives with sufficient capital, conviction, and cultural literacy to keep buying after the hype fades—viewing NFT collections as investable arguments.

Add anonymous institutional collectors, family offices quietly amassing assets, and Christie’s now seeing enough on-chain bidding to justify a dedicated platform—you get a picture that contradicts the public narrative of “NFTs are dead.”

NFTs are accumulating. They’re just accumulating in the hands of people who don’t post portfolios daily on Twitter.

The Medici reference is the whole deal:

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

That’s what the original Medici family did.

That’s 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, concentrated, 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 America and Europe have formally committed to digital and on-chain art.

Every major art movement over the past 150 years was mocked for decades before being taken seriously. Depending on where you start counting, NFT art is only 7 to 12 years old. We’re in 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 $69.3M. Pak $91.8M. Cherniaev $6.2M in deep bear market. Anadol projecting on the Las Vegas Sphere.

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

This is the misunderstanding most people have about NFTs.

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

NFTs flipped that. Culture can now be infinitely distributed and simultaneously finite-owned.

This is the key point. 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 scarce art with social consensus is the new scarce land. Those accumulating it now are doing exactly what every generation of serious collectors does when a new medium begins to matter.

This is the only thing locking the entire argument:

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

It doesn’t solve everything—copyright, storage, authorship, and cultural value remain crucial—but it solves the provenance problem better than the traditional art market ever has.

The traditional art market loses billions annually to forgeries, missing provenance, and disputed attributions. The Knoedler Gallery in New York—America’s oldest gallery, with 165 years of history—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 this is disputed.”

On-chain art has none of these problems. 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 entire game.

This is what Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967 about dematerialization—finally completed.

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

If you truly plot the data—museum collections, auction records, gallery representation, collector base, historical timeline, inheritance demographics, structural issues in traditional markets, and the superiority of on-chain provenance systems—there is no honest interpretation that believes NFT art will stay at $2 billion.

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

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 intergenerational tailwinds 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 crash—and institutionalized faster than almost any other hated art movement in history.

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

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 works of on-chain art are 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 frenzy.

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. This isn’t a theoretical observation. It’s a number you can look up.

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

History is remarkably consistent about who looks foolish in these exchanges.

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

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

Original Author: @vangoyaa

Original Compilation: @Xuegaogx