Five Years After the NFT Peak: Who Actually Survived

Five years ago, a cartoon ape sold for more than a house. Today most NFT collections from that era trade for less than a dinner. In 2024, I would have asked whether the market could come back. In 2026 I can do something better: look at what actually happened to the projects everyone was watching, and what that tells you if you are thinking about buying an NFT now.

The year 2021 will stay in crypto history for two reasons. Bitcoin set a new all-time high of roughly 68,800 dollars in November, and NFTs went mainstream. Everyone remembers the frenzy around the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, where a single token at one point sold for more than 500,000 dollars. Musicians, athletes, and actors used the apes as profile pictures; the collection became a status symbol, and every new project that followed tried to overtake the “monkeys”.

Then the market turned, and it stayed turned. Unlike cryptocurrencies, which have gone through several full cycles since, NFTs never recovered as a whole. What did happen is more interesting than a simple crash. A handful of projects found a way forward, most disappeared, and a few are still delivering on what they promised years ago. Below I look at the numbers and at three projects I highlighted in the original version of this article, with an honest account of how each one turned out.

What is an NFT?

An NFT, short for non-fungible token, is a digital token recorded on a blockchain, the public ledger that also records cryptocurrency transactions. What separates it from a cryptocurrency is uniqueness. One Bitcoin is interchangeable with any other Bitcoin. An NFT carries a unique identity, so no two are the same, and one cannot be swapped for another at face value. NFTs are most often used to represent digital artwork, music, in-game items, or membership passes. The blockchain provides a transparent, tamper-resistant record of who owns each one, which is what lets artists and creators sell digital work directly to collectors for the first time.

NFT Market in 2021 vs 2026

The peak years look enormous in hindsight. In 2021, the market recorded about 24.7 billion dollars in trading volume, and 2022 stayed near that level or above it depending on how wash trading is counted. From there, the decline was steady rather than sudden. Volume fell to roughly 16.8 billion in 2023 and then to 13.7 billion in 2024, a year DappRadar called the worst since 2020, with sales down 18% as well.

The slide continued in 2025. Quarterly volume dropped to around 1.5 billion in the first quarter and 0.8 billion in the second, before recovering to about 1.6 billion in the third. One number moved the other way: the count of NFTs sold hit a record 18.1 million in the third quarter of 2025, the highest since 2022. That combination, more sales at lower value, says the market did not die. It got cheap. The art segment tells the harshest version of the story, with trading volume down 93% from its 2021 peak.

Famous IRL Brands in the NFT World

In 2021 and 2022 real-world companies rushed in with collections of their own, and the exit was as fast as the entry. As volume dried up, many projects went into “stand by”, waiting for hype that never returned. That left holders with roadmaps, the public list of promises a project makes at launch, that were quietly abandoned.

Dolce & Gabbana is the case I keep coming back to. The project promised holders physical products at least once a year. It delivered in year one, then stopped, and holders were hit with heavy import taxes on the items that did arrive. The brand refunded those costs, but the giveaways did not continue. In 2024, a group of buyers filed a class action in the United States over the unfulfilled promises [VERIFY current status of the case]. Whatever the outcome, it set a precedent: an NFT roadmap can end up in court.

What Happened?

Over time, NFTs turned into a “copy-paste” market where everything boils down to current “Hype,” unreasonable promises about a potential game, and “staking” of NFTs that brings virtual tokens with no actual use value. Specific collections that have been on the market since the beginning have understood differentiation from the competition and the importance of adapting to the current situation. These collections show that even during periods of NFT stagnation, it is possible to progress and generate profit for holders. They can be considered for purchase even in challenging times for the NFT market. In the following text, we will give you examples of some of the projects that were rightfully on our radar:

1. Pudgy Penguins

Pudgy Penguins is a collection of 8,888 penguin NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, launched in July 2021 by a group of students and bought by entrepreneur Luca Netz for 2.5 million dollars in April 2022 after the original team was widely considered to have abandoned it. That purchase is the reason this project still exists.

The new owners did the thing almost nobody else did: they built a consumer brand. Pudgy Penguins plush toys and trading cards now sit on shelves at Walmart, Target, Walgreens, Amazon, and international chains such as 7-Eleven, with retail sales estimated in the tens of millions of dollars a year. On the blockchain side, Pudgy Penguins was the top NFT collection of 2024 by trading volume at 786 million dollars, with a floor price, the lowest price at which any NFT in the collection is listed, up 114% that year. In December 2024, the project launched its own token, PENGU, and in April 2026 the NFT floor pushed back above 5 ETH.

Now the honest part. Two years ago I wrote that holders would probably receive passive income from real-world sales, “as if you own the shares of this company”. That did not happen. Neither the NFTs nor the PENGU token has any mechanism that passes retail revenue to holders. The brand succeeded; the financial link to holders was never built. The token itself hit an all-time high near 0.068 dollars in December 2024 and trades around 0.009 dollars today, roughly 87% lower. Pudgy Penguins is the best outcome in this article, and even here the assumption I made about holder rewards was wrong.

2. Jack Butcher: Checks and Opepen

Jack Butcher was the creator who, for a stretch in 2023, seemed to slow the market’s decline on his own. In January 2023, with saturation already obvious and new projects collapsing within days, he released “Checks” as a free open edition. An open edition has no fixed supply; the mint, the act of creating the NFTs, stays open for a set window, and the final size of the collection is whatever gets claimed in that time. Checks went from zero to about 2.8 ETH within weeks, and the format became a trend.

Opepen, his second open edition, produced 16,000 NFTs. The concept was clever: holders opt into lotteries, and 80 of them at a time have their “unrevealed” Opepen turned into a finished artwork from a curated set, 200 sets in total. Collaborations, including one with Pudgy Penguins, pushed individual sets well above 5 ETH at their peak.

When I first wrote about it, an unrevealed Opepen cost about 0.34 ETH, and I noted that Butcher’s announcements could send prices sharply higher. That was the wrong thing to focus on. The mechanism was interesting; the price was hype. Opepen now trades near 0.085 ETH, roughly 75% lower in ETH terms, and Checks sits around 0.5 ETH. The art is still there, and the sets still get revealed. The attention moved on, and in this market, attention was most of the price.

3. Crypto Mories

Crypto Mories minted at the very top of the 2021 bull market, with an unusual pitch: free therapy sessions for holders, a transparent founder, and an active community. The collection reached an all-time high near 2.5 ETH before the bear market pulled it down like everyone else. The decision by major marketplaces to stop enforcing royalties, the percentage of each resale paid to the creator, hurt small teams like this one especially.

The team kept working, and two years ago the roadmap looked serious: a AAA-quality game with a public sneak peek, a mobile version built by developers with a Crash Bandicoot credit, and a project token to tie the ecosystem together, all due in the first quarter of 2024. The floor price jumped from 0.04 to 0.17 ETH on that news.

As of the most recent public updates I could find, from late 2024, the game was still “in development” and the token still “in the pipeline”. I could not confirm a release of either. I include this not to single out one team but because it is the most common NFT story of all: a real roadmap, a real price jump on the announcement, and then a long silence. If you buy on a roadmap, you are buying a promise, and most promises in this market have not been kept.

Conclusion

The NFT market in 2026 is not dead, but it is not the market of 2021 either. Volume is a fraction of the peak while the number of sales keeps rising, which means a lot of cheap tokens changing hands and very few expensive ones. Some experts still expect an NFT rebound to follow the next crypto cycle, as it did once before, when NFTs peaked after the wider market turned. I wouldn’t base a decision on that. It happened one time.

What the last five years do show is which projects survived and why. The one that thrived did so by becoming a real business outside the blockchain, and even then its holders did not share in the profits. The one built on an artist’s attention faded when the attention moved. Finally, the one built on a roadmap is still waiting for the roadmap. So if you are considering a collection today, check whether the founders are still working, whether they communicate with holders on X and Discord, whether the project makes money in any way that does not depend on the next buyer, and whether anything promised to holders has actually been delivered.

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