Is an NFT the picture itself?

Usually not. The token holds a number, an owner and a link to a file that describes the item. The picture sits at that link on an ordinary server, and anyone can copy it.

How much is Justin Bieber’s Bored Ape worth now?

He paid 500 ether, about $1.3 million, for ape number 3001 in January 2022. Decrypt later put its value at about $12,000.

Are most NFTs worthless now?

By one count, yes. In September 2023 dappGambl found that 69,795 of 73,257 collections had a market capitalisation of zero, meaning no one was bidding on them.

What is an NFT?

Short answer

An NFT, or non-fungible token, is a record on a blockchain, usually Ethereum, saying that token number such-and-such belongs to a certain wallet. The token itself usually holds only a link to a picture stored somewhere else, and anyone can still download the picture. In 2021 such records sold for millions; by 2023 most collections had no buyers at all.

Mikhail SavchenkoUpdated 14 October 2026

A receipt with a link

One bitcoin cannot be told apart from another. An NFT exists in a single copy and belongs to one wallet. The Ethereum standard for such tokens, ERC-721, gives each token a number and an owner, and an optional field, tokenURI, with the address of a file that describes the item (EIP-721). The picture lives at that address, on someone’s server, and not in the blockchain. The blockchain records only who owns the line pointing to it (chapter “Million-Dollar Apes”).

The first famous collection was given away. In June 2017 two Canadian programmers at Larva Labs drew ten thousand pixel people, CryptoPunks, recorded each as a separate token and handed them out to anyone willing to pay a small network fee. They were all claimed within a week (same chapter).

The 2021 boom

On 11 March 2021 Christie’s sold “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, a collage by the artist Beeple, for $69.3 million. The buyer was a crypto investor who goes by Metakovan (The Block). Shortly before the auction his fund had bought twenty other Beeple works and issued its own token on them, so the record price also lifted the value of what the fund already held (chapter “Million-Dollar Apes”).

The star of the boom was the Bored Ape Yacht Club, ten thousand drawn apes that sold for about $200 apiece in April 2021. An ape was a ticket to a private club and an avatar for celebrities (same chapter). In January 2022 Justin Bieber paid 500 ether, about $1.3 million, for ape number 3001; a few years later it was valued at about $12,000 (Decrypt). On 30 April 2022 Yuga Labs, the apes’ creator, sold plots of land in a metaverse that did not yet exist and took in about $320 million in a few hours (same chapter).

What was left

Jack Dorsey’s first tweet sold as an NFT for $2.9 million in 2021. A year later the buyer put it up for sale hoping for $50 million, and the best bid was $280 (same chapter). In September 2023 the crypto gambling site dappGambl went through 73,257 NFT collections and found that 69,795 of them had a market capitalisation of zero ether, meaning nobody was offering anything for them (The Register). The study came from an interested party and measured a proxy, but the direction matches every other number from that market: weekly turnover in the summer of 2023 was about three percent of the August 2021 peak (same chapter).

The picture someone paid a million for can still be downloaded by anyone, printed and hung on a wall, and it will look exactly like the owner’s. The million bought a line in a blockchain stating that the line belongs to the buyer. Ethereum will keep that line for as long as it runs (same chapter).