Recent gains in the floor prices of several headline NFT collections have put the sector back on traders’ screens. On Sept. 28, meme coin trader Ansem said in a video interview that he is optimistic about an NFT return in this cycle. He said art NFTs could see another burst of activity, but the more important story is the experimentation around the NFT format itself: combinations with AI agents, new ownership structures, new issuance models, and broader ways for NFTs to connect with onchain products.
OpenSea data shows CryptoPunks floor prices climbed from about 29 ETH to about 34 ETH in the second half of September. On Solana, Mad Lads also moved sharply, with the floor rising from 6.6 SOL in mid-September to above 12 SOL at one point, nearly doubling.
That rebound has reopened an old question: is the NFT boom actually coming back?
Two months earlier, Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi had taken the opposite side. In a July interview, he said some things in crypto are not coming back. 「If you’re still sitting there holding NFTs, waiting for the next NFT cycle, it’s time to let go and put your time, capital, and talent elsewhere.」 Dragonfly also made its positioning clear when it closed roughly $650 million for Fund IV in February, leaning more explicitly into stablecoins, DeFi and prediction markets, while writing that “non-financial crypto has failed.”
Weekly sales are still in the tens of millions, nowhere near the frenzy years
The market data in the article does not support a broad revival. According to CryptoSlam, global NFT sales totaled about $55.51 million in the seven days through Sept. 26, up 57.17% from the previous week. But the prior week, through Sept. 19, came in at only about $37.54 million. The week of Aug. 29 was about $63.33 million.
That leaves seven-day rolling sales in the tens of millions of dollars as of late September, far below the NFT mania of 2021 and 2022, when single-day volume often ran into the hundreds of millions. The article notes that weekly spikes now tend to come from a small number of high-priced sales rather than a broad-based recovery.
Chain distribution is concentrated as well. In the week ending Sept. 26, Ethereum accounted for about $30.33 million, more than half of the total. Polygon posted about $7.44 million and Bitcoin about $5.13 million. On the collectibles side, CryptoPunks ranked first with about $8.24 million in weekly sales, across 85 transactions, 62 buyer addresses and 55 seller addresses. The top end is moving, but participation is still thin.
Longer-term figures look colder. BlockchainDose cited CryptoSlam data in July saying NFT trading volume for 2025 was about $5.5 billion, down about 37% from 2024 and more than 90% below the 2021 peak. Art NFTs have done even worse. DappRadar data shows digital art volume fell from about $2.9 billion in 2021 to $197 million in 2024, then to only about $23.8 million in the first quarter of 2025.
The market still exists. It has narrowed from a mass speculative arena into a much tighter one.
Legacy blue chips remain far below peak levels
Most major NFT floors are still well under their highs even with ETH quoted at $2,670. The article uses Bored Ape Yacht Club as the clearest example. BAYC once carried a community narrative around becoming a Web3 Disney-style brand. Today, the brand remains, but its pricing power and liquidity have weakened sharply.
On Sept. 28, Blockstream CEO Adam Back commented on the ape Justin Bieber bought in January 2022 for 500 ETH, worth about $1.3 million at the time. Back said the item is now worth zero, or even less than zero, because selling it still costs money.
Pudgy Penguins, the article argues, needs to be split into two stories. The penguin JPEG floor is around 3.28 ETH, with the collection valued at roughly $70 million to $80 million. The PENGU token, meanwhile, has been trading near $0.009, with a circulating market cap listed at about $5.77, and is down about 86% from its December 2024 all-time high. The point the article makes is that liquidity tied to the brand narrative has shifted more toward the token than the NFT itself.
The three conditions behind the 2021 boom have changed
The report says Haseeb’s view lines up with three facts that have already changed.
First, the one-off setup that powered the 2021 boom is gone. That cycle combined altcoin wealth effects, pandemic stay-at-home behavior, a newly understood ERC-721 standard, and celebrity participation that turned profile pictures into status competition. PFPs became social currency. Floor prices became belief systems. The article argues that combination is hard to reproduce. In this cycle, retail attention has shifted toward meme coins and tokenized stocks, not profile-picture walls on OpenSea.
Second, demand did not keep up with supply. Dragonfly Fund III still listed NFTs, blockchain gaming and DAOs among its themes. Fund IV moved toward financial infrastructure. In public discussions around February, Haseeb repeatedly said users were not driven away by regulation or scams; they simply did not want those consumer Web3 products. Money and talent were poured into games, social apps, creator tokens and PFP brands, but demand never really arrived.
Third, liquidity in old blue chips has thinned to the point where it can no longer support the idea of a full “cycle.” BAYC doing three trades in a day, and floors in Azuki, Doodles and CloneX no longer serving as blue-chip pricing anchors, tells a different story. If an asset class trades only a few tens of millions of dollars a week and that activity is concentrated in a handful of collections such as Punks, the article says it is not waiting for a broad bull market. It is waiting for the next burst of concentrated buying.
There is another path. NFTs may keep spilling into physical consumer products, IP licensing and retail distribution, as Pudgy Penguins has done. The market may still price the brand, while refusing to restore 2021-style liquidity to the image itself.
Capital now favors yield, liquidity, composability and cash flow
The article frames the shift in simple terms. In 2021, NFTs sold scarcity, identity, social capital and wealth effects. Today’s capital markets care more about yield, liquidity, composability, tradability and cash flow. The problem with JPEGs is not that nobody likes them. It is that they lose on capital efficiency when compared with financial assets.
From a wider cycle view, the piece says NFTs are going through a brutal but necessary bubble-clearing process. It breaks NFT development into three stages:
- Stage one, in 2021, was driven by pure consensus, breakout attention and celebrity effects. The profile picture was social currency.
- Stage two, in 2024 and 2025, saw NFTs reduced to tools for early interaction on new chains and for farming airdrops, effectively becoming accessories for token acquisition.
- Stage three brings the market back to basics: what does the asset actually do, and how is the financial mechanism designed?
In that reading, the collapse of the old image bubble is not a bad thing. It clears room for mechanism design and product innovation.
If “the boom” means the 2021 version — celebrities changing profile pictures, floors updating daily, and almost any JPEG being treated as an appreciating asset — current data does not show it returning, and does not show it returning in the same form.
If NFTs do come back, the article says, they are more likely to come back as wrappers for RWA, fees and agents.
CryptoPunks is moving closer to a digital-artifact pricing logic. The article says the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired eight CryptoPunks in December 2025: CryptoPunks 4018, 2786, 5616, 5160, 3407, 7178, 74 and 7899. BAYC and Azuki, by contrast, are described as brand collections that often sit with listings and only occasional bids.
Why Pudgy Penguins has held up better than most
Pudgy Penguins is presented as one of the clearest examples of an old blue-chip NFT surviving through both bull and bear markets. If CryptoPunks kept a firm floor by abandoning utility narratives and leaning fully into an irreplaceable digital-artifact identity, Pudgy broke out by stepping beyond the narrow zero-sum game inside Web3.
The JPEG floor is still around 3.28 ETH, and the collection has maintained relatively high activity and attention over the past one to two years. The article says Pudgy Penguins worked with multiple crypto protocols on profile-picture marketing campaigns. Historical data cited in the piece includes major exchanges such as Coinbase, Binance US, OKX and Kraken, along with wallet and payments brands including Phantom, Ledger and MoonPay.
That has pushed Pudgy beyond a simple PFP trade, turning it into what the article calls a super IP with strong cultural reach and a sense of safety.
The collection has also been used multiple times by some crypto protocols as an NFT for airdrop eligibility, and gains in its token price have supported attention and floor prices. But the article says that still does not capture the real business picture.
The bigger win came from expansion into physical consumer goods, IP licensing and retail channels. Pudgy toys, according to the article, are now distributed across thousands of Walmart, Target and Walgreens stores in the United States, with cumulative sales above one million units and more than $10 million in physical retail revenue.
The core move was to decouple liquidity from the brand. Brand narrative and high-frequency trading liquidity were pushed into PENGU, a token with a large circulating market cap and daily trading volume that can reach hundreds of millions of dollars, while the original NFT became a “super VIP pass” for the brand’s core layer. While other old blue chips were still waiting for bids on OpenSea, Pudgy had already built monetization on both sides: Web2 retail shelves and Web3 secondary-market tokens.
Robinhood Chain experiments: Quotrons and StonkBrokers
The article says Robinhood Chain has not only attracted meme coin traders since launch. It has also become a venue for experiments that combine NFTs with RWA-style structures. OpenSea data shows three broad categories of popular NFTs on the chain: culture or meme PFPs such as Hashcats, Cash Cats and Rekt Tradooor; protocol or brand equity NFTs such as Chain Mancers and Goat Street; and the most active category by volume, stock-container NFT-Fi projects such as Quotrons, StonkBrokers and RH Machines.
Quotrons and StonkBrokers are singled out as the projects that shifted attention away from “a new chain launching new pictures” and back to the question of what NFTs can actually do. Their visual styles are different — one resembles a 1960s Wall Street quote terminal, the other a pixel-art stockbroker — but the underlying idea is the same. They turn an NFT from a transferable image into a container that can hold assets, distribute fees, and transfer positions together with the NFT when sold.
That is a sharp break from the main blue-chip NFT model of 2021 and 2022. Punks, BAYC and Pudgy derived value from community, profile-picture identity and later IP. The JPEG itself did not generate cash flow. GameFi briefly tried to support holders with ever-expanding game-token emissions, and inflation usually crushed floors. Later NFT-Fi projects such as NFTX, Sudoswap, BendDAO and Blend added leverage and liquidity to existing images, making them easier to trade, but they still did not make the assets productive.
Quotrons and StonkBrokers reverse the order. They first define what the NFT can hold and why it receives distributions. The image is only the shell. The funding source is not points printed by a project team. It is real onchain trading fees, which are then used to buy stock tokens issued by Robinhood. The article is explicit on one point: stock tokens provide price exposure to equities, not ownership in listed companies, and they do not carry voting rights.
Quotrons: a machine that mints stock exposure
Quotrons has a fixed supply of 4,444 and uses ERC-404, with one fungible token corresponding to one terminal. When first acquired, the screen is dark and the item can only be traded. Once the holder burns the corresponding token, the terminal is permanently connected, the screen lights up, and it begins receiving tokenized U.S. equities along preset tracks, including NVDA, AAPL, TSLA, GME and SPY.
Burned tokens do not return to circulation, so each activated terminal removes one more unit from the tradable float. The terminal also receives trading-fee flows, with part used for rewards and part for buybacks and burns. The article’s distinction from a traditional PFP is blunt: the buyer is not purchasing a rare skin, but deciding whether to lock liquidity into a machine that cannot be sold back into the market.
StonkBrokers: turning the NFT itself into a wallet
StonkBrokers takes a different route. All 4,444 broker NFTs are built on ERC-6551. Each NFT generates its own token-bound account at mint, and that account is preloaded with random stocks. After activation, the NFT shares in Anvil AMM fees according to its tier. The protocol uses those fees to buy more stocks in the market and deposits them into the accounts of activated brokers.
When the NFT is sold, unclaimed assets in the account move with the image. Activation status resets at the same time, so the next holder must pay another activation fee to keep receiving rewards, with part of that fee burned. The paired STONKBROKER token ties the NFT and token into a two-way exchange relationship: the image can be redeemed for a fixed amount of tokens, and the tokens can be redeemed back into the image. The result is that holders are no longer trading just a profile picture. They are trading a broker NFT, the stock exposure inside it, and the right to future fee distributions.
The article says these mechanisms separate themselves from older NFTs in three ways:
- Rights to revenue are written into the contract rather than promised in a roadmap.
- Supply shrinks through use: Quotrons through hardwired burns, StonkBrokers through activation burns and reset mechanics on transfer.
- The object being transferred has changed. The market used to sell images and community tickets. Now it can sell accounts with positions attached.
The next NFT role may sit on top of RWA rails
On Sept. 20, Ansem said he had bought his first batch of NFTs in years. His view was that tokenized stocks, RWA and stablecoins are laying the infrastructure, and NFTs can become the ownership, access and community layer on top. Hybrid models that combine NFTs with fungible tokens failed before, he said, but are worth trying again: liquid tokens can handle broad participation, while NFTs can carry higher-tier rights.
The article says that view is not baseless, but the evidence is not in JPEGs. It is in the RWA market. Analysis from a16z crypto says RWA perpetual volume reached $117.3 billion in August 2026, about 44 times higher year over year. Of that, about $101 billion, or 86%, took place onchain, while centralized exchanges handled about $16 billion. Open interest stood at about $4.8 billion, roughly 30 times the $161 million recorded in July 2025. By composition, equities made up 48%, commodities 28%, and indexes 18%.
Put differently, the ownership being traded onchain has already shifted in large part toward stocks, bonds, commodities and their perpetual contracts. For NFTs to regain a place in this cycle, the article argues, they need to plug into those thicker rails. The task is not to reprice profile pictures. It is to make an NFT the container, access pass or dividend certificate for those assets.
That is why the old “NFT plus fungible token” model may deserve another look. In 2021, NFT buyers paid for scarcity and identity, and returns depended on the next bid. Today, a pure JPEG cannot compete on capital efficiency with a tokenized stock that trades around the clock. The precondition has changed: once there are tradable stock tokens and fee streams underneath, an NFT finally has something real to hold.
More Robinhood Chain experiments
Robinhood Chain already has several projects built around that logic, though the article stresses they remain experiments.
RH Machines is a fixed-supply set of 10,000 “mini stock booths” on Robinhood Chain. New machines start in sleep mode. They only power on after the paired PRINTER token is burned, a process the project calls “inking.” From there, each machine receives tokenized U.S. stocks bought with protocol fees, weighted by rarity and other factors, and those assets are deposited into the machine’s own onchain account. PRINTER supply only goes down, never up, while fees are used both to buy stocks and to burn tokens. The article says the floor rebounded from a low of 0.003 ETH to around 0.04 ETH.
Rare Friends Genesis, another project mentioned, is a genesis collection by a Doodles co-founder. It has a supply of 1,024, with visuals and animation written directly into the contract, and each NFT comes with its own wallet. Buying the NFT does not automatically grant distributions. Holders must pay another 100,000 RF to activate it, with half burned and half sent to a reward pool, in order to receive a fixed weight. Selling the NFT resets activation, so the next buyer must pay again. The article describes it as more like an onchain pet with dividend rights. OpenSea data shows its floor has fallen from 2 ETH to below 1 ETH.
Outside these onchain experiments, some industry figures are also positive on tokenized physical assets. OpenSea chief marketing officer Adam Hollander said in an interview in May that even though prices for profile-picture collections such as BAYC and CryptoPunks have already collapsed, NFTs remain an effective technology for proving ownership of digital and physical assets. He said many people bought NFTs in the past without truly wanting the item itself. In his view, the next wave of adoption is more likely to come from tokenized collectibles such as Pokémon cards and Rolex watches, digital tickets, in-game items and AI tools.
Not a return to 2021, but a different kind of evolution
The article’s conclusion is direct. The NFT boom of 2021, where a celebrity changing a profile picture could send prices flying, is over. But that may also be the start of NFT maturity.
The sector is moving from consensus-driven speculation toward cash flow and composability, and from being an airdrop farming tool toward becoming infrastructure for AI agents and RWA-linked products. As long as the market keeps exploring ownership structures, the article argues, NFTs stripped of the JPEG bubble may still find a harder, more capital-efficient revival.
