Recently, I’ve been looking at NFT market data, and it’s pretty interesting. Everyone keeps saying that NFTs are dead, yet when we enter 2026, there are signs of a price rebound—this contrast is definitely a bit surprising.

But if you look closely at the data, you’ll understand that this so-called “recovery” is really just existing capital enjoying itself within a very small range. According to NFT Price Floor statistics, over the past week, although the prices of hundreds of projects rose, and some even saw three-digit to four-digit percentage gains, compared with the bottom at the end of 2025, it’s only a slight bounce back. The real problem is that liquidity has nearly dried up.

I checked the trading data: among more than 1,700 NFT projects, only 6 have trading volumes at the million-dollar level, 14 are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and 72 are in the tens of thousands of dollars. The vast majority of NFTs have transaction volume in single digits or even 0. This is the current NFT market—a place full of small pictures that no one seems to care about.

What’s interesting is that The Block’s 2025 report shows that total NFT trading volume for the year was only $5.5 billion, down 37% compared with 2024. The situation is even worse for market cap: it shrank from $9 billion straight down to $2.4 billion. Behind these figures is a clear reality: new capital simply isn’t buying in anymore—only old players are left holding the bag.

So what are the former NFT leaders doing now? OpenSea is no longer fixated on JPEG images and has shifted toward token trading; Flow has started exploring DeFi; Zora has abandoned the traditional NFT model and moved to content tokens. Even a flagship event like NFT Paris was canceled due to depleted funding. You see, even the industry’s top players are fleeing the NFT bubble.

But capital hasn’t disappeared entirely—it’s just moved to a different battlefield. I’ve noticed that many crypto elites are beginning to return to real-world assets: artist Beeple has turned to creating physical robots; Wintermute co-founder spent $5 million to buy dinosaur fossils; Animoca founder put $9 million into buying a violin artwork. This is a very clear signal: the appeal of virtual images has been crushed by tangible collectibles.

So is anyone still playing NFTs now? Yes, but the way they play has completely changed. Now, money mainly flows into a few categories: first, “gold shovels” NFTs with clear expectations for airdrops—essentially financial instruments rather than collectibles; second, projects endorsed by celebrities or top-tier brands, where short-term premiums are driven by the attention economy; third, top IPs like CryptoPunks that have already entered museums and have long-term collectible value; fourth, projects acquired by large investors—those will be re-priced by the market.

Another category worth paying attention to is NFTs built on real-world assets. For example, Pokémon card tokenization platforms allow trading the ownership of physical cards on-chain, while the physical items are held in escrow by the platform. This model at least provides support for NFTs’ real-world value.

Overall, the NFT bubble has indeed burst, but it hasn’t completely died. The logic right now is simple: meaningless little pictures aren’t wanted anymore—only NFTs with real utility, clear value support, or short-term arbitrage opportunities can survive. This market warming looks more like a cold, ruthless re-pricing of the NFT bubble rather than a true recovery.