The NFT Cycle: What Actually Happened
At peak NFT mania in 2021-22, BAYC floor prices exceeded $300k, total NFT trading volume exceeded $25 billion in a single quarter, and every celebrity, brand, and venture fund was announcing a collection. By 2023, trading volume had fallen 97% from peak. The prediction market at peak mania — "will NFT market cap be higher in two years?" — would have been an interesting NO trade.
The 2027 NFT Prediction Market Questions
- →Gaming NFTs vs art NFTs: game item NFTs with genuine utility (tradeable in-game assets) have a fundamentally different use case than profile picture collections
- →Major brand NFT programmes: Nike, Adidas, and Starbucks all ran NFT programmes — will these survive or wind down?
- →Ordinals and Bitcoin NFTs: the Ordinals protocol brought NFTs to Bitcoin — a different population, different cultural dynamics
- →On-chain provenance: NFTs as certificates of authenticity for physical goods remain a plausible use case that hasn't been fully tried
The honest prediction market assessment: NFT art collections as pure speculation vehicles are unlikely to recover to 2021 peaks — the retail audience has been burned and won't return at scale. NFTs as infrastructure for digital ownership in gaming, events, and memberships have a more durable thesis, though one that will develop slowly.
Boromarket's NFT milestone markets focus on specific, measurable outcomes — floor price thresholds, protocol volume metrics — rather than sentiment-based calls.