Are NFTs dead?

NFTs are not dead in the sense of having stopped. People still create, buy and sell them every week. What has shrunk is the money flowing through the market and the number of big companies backing it. Whether that counts as dead depends on whether you measure dollars, transactions or the uses described in what are NFTs used for.

Are NFTs dead in 2026?

By dollar volume, the market is a fraction of its size a few years ago. DappRadar, as reported by The Block in January 2025, put NFT trading volume at $57.2 billion in 2022, $16.8 billion in 2023 and $13.7 billion in 2024, which it called the weakest year since 2020. CryptoSlam, which counts differently, put total 2025 sales at about $5.63 billion, down roughly 37% from 2024, Cointelegraph reported on December 31, 2025.

At the same time, the number of NFTs keeps growing. CryptoSlam counted more than 1.34 billion in existence by the end of 2025, up 25% in a year, so far more items are chasing a smaller pool of money.

Activity has not gone to zero. In the seven days to November 7, 2026, CryptoSlam data showed about 788,000 NFT transactions and close to 269,000 buyer addresses, crypto.news reported.

Are NFTs completely dead, or just smaller?

Sales counts tell a different story from dollar totals. DappRadar data cited by CryptoPotato showed NFT sales rising from 7 million in the first quarter of 2025 to more than 18.1 million in the third, with unique trading wallets up from 1.66 million to 2.14 million. More, cheaper trades replaced fewer, larger ones.

The business side has thinned out. Kraken closed its NFT marketplace in February 2025, Nike's RTFKT studio stopped operating in January 2025, and Bybit and X2Y2 both shut their marketplaces in April 2025, according to Decrypt. Gemini made Nifty Gateway withdrawal-only in January 2026 and set February 23, 2026 as its closing date. OpenSea is still running, as covered in is OpenSea safe.

Can NFTs make a comeback?

Nobody can say, and short bursts of activity have come and gone before. The 2025 rise in sales count was one example, driven partly by sports and profile-picture collections.

Supporters point to uses beyond trading, such as tickets, game items, memberships and tokens tied to physical goods. Skeptics note that most of the 2021 demand came from speculation and that much of the supply rarely trades at all. Discussions on forums such as Reddit tend to split along the same lines.

What has not changed is how the technology works. An NFT is still a token in a smart contract that records ownership, as explained in what is an NFT. Market data changes quickly, so dated figures like those above are a snapshot rather than a forecast.