During the pandemic, humanity as a collective decided to simply burn money on new and unproven investments. Some people (particularly in Australia) bought property, some got into cryptocurrency, and others thought NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) were the moneymaking machine of the future. As it turns out, NFTs are worthless according to a new report from dappGambl.
There was serious money involved in NFTs reaching a trading volume equal to US$17 billion with a peak of $2.8 billion in August 2021. All that cash may as well have been ground up and scattered like ashes, because they are now literally worthless.
Researchers discovered that 69,795 of 73,257 NFT collections have a market cap of zero Ether (ETH). As a percentage, about 95% of the NFTs held by over 23 million people are worth absolutely nothing.
There are a couple NFTs that still have some value, but even those are just a fraction of their original purchase price. Some examples include:
- Sina Estavi’s US$2.9 million NFT of Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey’s first tweet – now worth only $3,700
- Logan Paul’s $1 million Bumble Bee – now worth $2,700
- Justin Bieber’s $1.9 million Bored Ape Yachy Club #3001 – now $80,000
These NFTs are not only worth nothing, but they also have a huge negative impact on the environment.
As the report explains, “The minting process of NFTs involves certifying a digital asset as unique by making a transaction on the blockchain. Each minting consumes energy, just as any other operation in the digital realm does, though the amount of energy consumed by minting NFTs with little to no use case might be cause for alarm.
“To give a sense of scale, our study identified 195,699 NFT collections with no apparent owners or market share. The energy required to mint these NFTs is comparable to 27,789,258 kWh, resulting in an emission of approximately 16,243 metric tons of CO2.”
That’s equivalent to an entire year’s worth of emissions from 2,048 homes or 3,531 cars, according to the EPA.
Good riddance NFTs, we hardly knew ye.
