Whatever Happened to NFTs?

From Digital Gold Rush to Tulip Reboot

In early 2021, the world collectively lost its mind over NFTs.
Twitter avatars were selling for the price of sports cars. Celebrities were “dropping collections.” Even your neighbor’s kid was “minting” a pixelated rock, hoping someone would pay $10,000 for it.

It was new. It was wild. It was digital gold — or so we thought.

But within two years, the NFT boom went the way of the Dutch Tulip Mania of the 1600s — when a single tulip bulb sold for more than a skilled craftsman’s annual wage. Back then, people mortgaged homes to buy flowers. In 2021, they mortgaged reason to buy JPEGs.

A Modern Tulip Craze

Tulips were beautiful, rare, and fleeting. NFTs were digital, unique, and supposedly forever.
Both promised ownership of something special — and both were fueled by the same intoxicating formula: scarcity + social status + speculation.

In 1636, Dutch traders flipped tulip bulbs like stocks, with prices soaring 20x in months. In 2021, OpenSea traders flipped cartoon apes with the same manic energy. Everyone knew it couldn’t last — but no one wanted to miss out.