Along with DeFi, NFTs have taken to the forefront of the crypto industry, causing widespread hype comparable to the ICO boom in 2017. Search engine results confirm the immense popularity of NFT.
NFT Data Aggregator Non-Fungible reported in 2020 that the industry grew 300% over the previous year, with its total value increasing to about $ 250 million.
Since then, growth has taken on staggering proportions. Users have spent millions of dollars on digital artwork, celebrity NFTs, digitized albums, rare collectibles, and tweets. Yes, and tweets too.
It is no coincidence that NFT searches surpassed DeFi: the peak of requests for DeFi was observed from January 1 to 6, at the end of last month their number decreased and equaled NFT. Since then, the number of NFT requests has skyrocketed, and is now nearly three times that of DeFi.
Moreover, NFT searches have recently overshadowed ICO searches, also at a time of record interest. Despite this, with skeptics claiming NFT is a bubble, digital art connoisseurs continue to spend huge sums to acquire tokenized assets.
For example, yesterday ended the auction of the artist Beeple, at the end of which his work "The First 5000 Days" (The First 5000 Days) was sold for $ 69 million. This work is a combination of 5000 works of art on one canvas. NFT author Mike Winkelmann aka Beeple has been creating each piece for the last 5000 days.
People who are not yet familiar with NFT cannot imagine how avant-garde and sometimes lurid pictures can cost a fortune and increase their value over time. For example, one of nine alien CryptoPunks, which was bought for $ 15,000 in 2018, was resold for $ 8 million in March this year, a 53,000% increase.