Summary:
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The NFT craze of 2021 led to massive purchases, celebrity endorsements, and skyrocketing valuations, but now the bubble has burst.
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Logan Paul and Justin Bieber are among the celebrities who have seen their NFT investments plummet in value by over 95%.
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The total NFT market cap has dropped significantly, leading to the closure of major platforms and rendering roughly 95% of NFTs worthless.
Remember when everyone and their cousin was buying NFTs? When a pixelated ape was worth more than a house, and celebrities were flexing digital receipts like they’d cracked some kind of financial cheat code?
Yeah. About that.
YouTuber Logan Paul purchased an NFT from the 0N1 Force collection — a series of anime-style digital avatar artworks — for $635,000 in 2021. That same NFT is now valued at roughly $155, reflecting a loss of more than 99%. The valuation comparison recently circulated via the verified X account of Watcher.Guru and has since spread widely across cryptocurrency communities.
Paul himself acknowledged the L years ago. In a 2022 post on X, he wrote that the NFT he’d spent $623,000 on was “worth essentially nothing,” calling it an immortalized mistake. It’s only gotten worse since.
And he’s not the only one. Pop star Justin Bieber purchased a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for $1.3 million in January 2022 that has since dropped to around $12,000 by February 2026 — a decline of over 95%.
The 2021 NFT Boom, In Hindsight
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To understand how we got here, you have to remember how unhinged 2021 was. NFT trading hit $17.6 billion that year, a 21,000% surge from 2020’s total of $82 million, according to data from Nonfungible.com. More than 2.5 million crypto wallets were holding or trading NFTs, up from just 89,000 the year before. Beeple sold a single digital artwork for $69 million at Christie’s. Everybody wanted in.
Celebrity endorsements supercharged the frenzy. Paul alone spent over $2.5 million on 139 NFTs from 16 collections in 2021. The logic was simple: if a famous person bought it, it must be valuable. Scarcity narratives and online hype did the rest.
The hangover has been brutal. The total NFT market cap dropped from $17 billion in early 2022 to roughly $2.8 billion by January 2026 — an 84% decline. Average sale prices have dropped sharply, often falling below $100, with the art segment suffering the steepest declines.
The platforms that built the boom are disappearing. Nifty Gateway, one of the earliest NFT marketplaces that facilitated over $300 million in sales at its peak, shut down on February 23, 2026. Christie’s quietly closed its digital art department last fall, and Sotheby’s laid off most of its NFT team in 2024. Other shuttered platforms include Kraken NFT, X2Y2, Bybit NFT, LG Art Lab, and MakersPlace. Nike also quietly offloaded its NFT subsidiary RTFKT, which it had acquired during the boom.
Analysis suggests roughly 95% of NFTs are now worthless.
The broader crypto market isn’t having a great time either. After reaching an all-time high of approximately $126,198 in October 2025, Bitcoin has faced a sharp retracement. As of February 16, 2026, Bitcoin is trading around $68,605 — down more than 45% from that peak. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index has been hovering near “extreme fear” levels not seen since the 2022 FTX collapse. U.S. exchange-traded funds, which purchased 46,000 bitcoin at this point last year, have become net sellers in 2026.
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Some analysts are calling it a standard four-year cycle correction. Others are less optimistic.
