When Adam Greenbaum started buying NFTs in 2021, pretty much as soon as he learned of their existence. “I always wanted to be an art collector,” he says, “and this seemed like a cool thing to get into that wasn’t as expensive as being a fine art collector.”
Greenbaum, who works as the CMO of veterinarian SaaS startup Petvisor, says he’s always been an early adopter of new technologies, and with NFTs and crypto he was keen to join a craze he saw as thrilling and lucrative. He bought Alien Frens art pieces, some real estate in the metaverse, and, most staggeringly, spent $37,000 on a Bored Ape NFT.
But like many other NFT collectors in the past two years, he’s watched his NFT investments plummet in value. He spent close to $70,000 altogether on NFTs; he estimates their worth is about half that figure today. (If it’s any consolation, he at least fared better than the NFT of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet, which sold for $2.9 million on OpenSea in 2021 and is going for $350.)
Bur rather than cutting his losses and selling off his digital assets, Greenbaum is holding pat. He didn’t even budge when someone offered $15,000 for his Bored Ape NFT—less than what he paid, but still an impressive sum. “I’m willing to risk that $70,000 investment and hope for a bounce back in the Bored Ape market,” he says.
For now, at least, the market’s outlook remains grim. A 2023 report from crypto analysis firm dappGambl found that 95% of NFTs are worth practically nothing. The report found that, following the immense hype over NFTs between 2021 and 2022, around 79% of all NFT collections have remained unsold.
The SEC has issued several rulings on shady NFT offerings, such as their August 2023 statement on Impact Theory’s NFT collection that were “sold to investors as investment contracts and therefore securities. Accordingly, Impact Theory violated the federal securities laws by offering and selling these crypto asset securities to the public in an unregistered offering that was not otherwise exempt from registration.”
In 2023, the number of NFT sales dropped to a jaw-dropping level. At its peak in that year, January 5 saw a sales volume of 18,939 on that day and by December 20 that number cratered to 1,796, according to NonFungible.com’s market tracker.
