PARIS — A slew of celebrity endorsements
helped inflate a multi-billion-dollar bubble around digital tokens over the
past year, but
cryptocurrencies are crashing and some fear NFTs could be next.
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NFTs are tokens linked to digital images,
“collectible” items, avatars in games or property and objects in the burgeoning
virtual world of the metaverse.
The likes of
Paris Hilton,
Gwyneth Paltrow, and
Serena Williams have boasted about owning NFTs and many under-30s have been
enticed to gamble for the chance of making a quick profit.
But the whole sector is suffering a rout at the
moment with all the major cryptocurrencies slumping in value, and the signs for
NFTs are mixed at best.
The number of NFTs traded in the first quarter of
this year slumped by almost 50 percent compared to the previous quarter,
according to analysis firm Non-Fungible.
They reckoned the market was digesting the vast
amount of NFTs created last year, with the resale market just getting off the
ground.
Monitoring firm CryptoSlam reported a dramatic
tail-off in May, with just $31 million spent on art and collectibles in the
week to May 15, the lowest figure all year.
A symbol of the struggle is the forlorn attempt to
re-sell an NFT of Twitter founder
Jack Dorsey’s first tweet.
Dorsey managed to sell the NFT for almost $3 million
last year, but the new owner cannot find anyone willing to pay more than
$20,000.
The year of scams
Molly White, a prominent
critic of the crypto sphere, told AFP there were many possible reasons for the
downturn.
“It could be a general decrease in hype, it could be
fear of scams after so many high-profile ones, or it could be people tightening
their belts,” she said.
The reputation of the industry has been hammered for
much of the year.
The main exchange,
OpenSea, admitted in January that
more than 80 percent of the NFTs created with its free tool were fraudulent —
many of them copies of other NFTs or famous artworks reproduced without
permission.
“There’s a bit of everything on OpenSea,” said
Olivier Lerner, co-author of the book “NFT Mine d’Or” (NFT Gold Mine).
“It’s a huge site and it’s not curated, so you
really have no idea what you’re buying.”
LooksRare, an NFT exchange that overtook OpenSea for
volume of sales this year, got into similar problems as its rival.
As many as 95 percent of the transactions on its
platform were found to be fake, according to CryptoSlam.
Users were selling NFTs to themselves because
LooksRare was offering tokens with every transaction — no matter what you were
buying.
And the amounts lost to scams this year have been
eye-watering.
The owners of
Axie Infinity, a game played by
millions in the Philippines and elsewhere and a key driver of the NFT market,
managed to lose more than $500 million in a single swindle.
‘Like the lottery’
“As soon as you have a new
technology, you immediately have fraudsters circling,” lawyer Eric Barbry told
AFP.
He pointed out that the NFT market had no dedicated
regulation so law enforcement agencies are left to cobble together a response
using existing frameworks.
Molly White said strong regulation could help
eliminate the extreme speculation but that could, in turn, rob NFTs of their
major appeal — that they can bring quick profits.
“I think less hype would be a good thing -- in its
current form, NFT trading is enormously risky and probably unwise for the
average person,” she said.
NFTs are often likened to the traditional art market
because they have no inherent utility and their prices fluctuated wildly depending
on trends and hype.
But Olivier Lerner suggested a different comparison.
“It’s like the lottery,” he said of those seeking big
profits from NFTs. “You play, but you never win.”
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