The next stage of NFT development is to create objective utility and the possibility of their use. Objective utility is the use of non-fungible tokens, for example, as educational certificates or documents confirming property rights. This is convenient, but you must admit that you’d find it hard to imagine a multi-billion dollar trading market for such NFTs.

In turn, the practical application of NFTs was found back in 2017. The first prominent example was the GameFi project CryptoKitties. Judging by the DappRadar data, it’s still active and has a considerable audience, but its peak has long passed. The second significant example of the practical application of NFTs is the P2E gaming project Axie Infinity. It’s the market leader in terms of all-time sales, surpassing BAYC by over $1.2 billion.

The Axie Infinity project was so popular that many people in the Philippines quit their jobs at some point in time and fully devoted themselves to the gameplay, which involved actually earning money. The rise of Axie Infinity was interrupted by the hacking of the Ronin sidechain the game was based on. This was the largest hacker attack ever — cybercriminals stole more than $625 million in crypto. Next followed a downturn in the crypto market. Nevertheless, the project was relaunched. It’s still working steadily, with a monthly audience of about 20,000 active users and a trading volume of about $1.5 million per month.

However, even during the subsequent bull rally, GameFi projects won’t provide the same trading volume to the NFT market, as tokens are much more limited in their speculative component due to their functional application. They are much easier to value, and many of them have a specific price.

Therefore, there are no objective prerequisites for a new NFT boom. And that’s a good thing, because the segment is aggressively moving from quantitative to qualitative indicators. In the future, the value of NFTs will be determined by developers who can create and implement functional scenarios for using the technology of non-fungible tokens and not by speculators who endlessly inflate the price by selling images to each other and to themselves (wash trading).

Of course, there are many unaccounted factors that could still allow the NFT market to get back to its highs someday. For instance, the explosive growth in the user base of GameFi projects or a new wave of speculative trading driven by excess fiat money from big corporations. Still, both of these prospects are hard to pin down in the near future, so it’s fair to change the headline to the following: “The NFT market is unlikely to reach its previous peak levels in the next few years.”