Crypto artist beeple: NFT speculators have left, leaving only core enthusiasts

Crypto artist Mike "Beeple" Winkelmann sold the NFT artwork "Everydays: The First 5,000 Days" for $69.3 million in 2021, setting a record. Since then, enthusiasm around NFTs has cooled significantly, with trading volume plummeting by more than 90%. Recently, Beeple recalled in an interview: "Looking back on those days, I feel crazy because NFTs have been hated for a much longer time than they have been loved. There was a short period of time when people would say, 'Yeah, this is the future', and then they said, 'Oh, you bastard, don't do this to me.'" "We lost a lot of people," Beeple added, "but these people never came for art, I could see it right away." He pointed out that at the "Everydays" auction, the market was "100%" a bubble. “I’d been making digital art for 20 years before that, and I saw people buying crap and it was like, ‘This can’t hold its value, that’s crap,’ ” Beeple said. “It’s not going to last, and you realize that’s right.” While Beeple acknowledged that the NFT market “will come back to reality” and that speculators have “pivoted,” he noted that “people are still very enthusiastic about this type of product,” leaving a core group of enthusiasts who “understand the technology.” Noting that CryptoPunks sold millions of dollars earlier this year, he said, “It’s crazy to me that it’s become so normalized.” Beeple also talked about the “segmentation” of the NFT market, where some projects have lost sight of the true vision of the technology. “The technology, the use of it, and the people associated with it, it’s not really like art, even they’ll say it’s a collectible, they’re trying to build a social club, and so on,” he said, pointing to the BAYC series, and arguing that the different use cases for NFTs have been “conflated.” (Decrypt)