# Why the NFT market will go from $2B to $60 billion

Source: https://x.com/vangoyaa/status/2051685780221731152

## Summary

The text argues that the NFT market, currently around $2 billion and down roughly 90% from its peak, is undervalued because major museums have already built collections of on-chain art. MoMA acquired Refik Anadol's Unsupervised in 2023, and Centre Pompidou acquired 18 NFT works from 13 artists that year, with curator Marcella Lista describing them as a continuation of the museum's existing collection. LACMA received 22 generative and blockchain works in February 2023 from collector Cozomo de' Medici. The text compares this to Impressionism and Pop Art, which it says were ridiculed before institutional adoption and later market repricing.

## Article

Most people in crypto think NFTs are dead.

Most people in the art world think NFTs were a scam that briefly fooled some Hollywood guys and a Singaporean crypto founder before mercifully going away.

And then there's the third group — the loudest one — that has been repeating the same three lines for four years straight:

"It's just a JPEG."

"I just right-click-saved your million-dollar monkey"

"NFTs are a scam. Pump-and-dumps of random animal pictures."

If you've been online at any point since 2021, you've heard all three. Probably said one of them yourself.

All of it is wrong, and the data is so loud about it that I'm honestly confused why nobody's saying this out loud.

The traditional art market did $59.6 billion in 2025, up 4% from the previous year, but still below its 2022 peak of $67.8 billion.

The NFT market sits around $2 billion right now, down roughly 90% from its peak. On the surface, you look at those numbers and say, "yeah, NFTs lost." But the surface is exactly the wrong place to be looking, because the entire art world — the museums, the blue-chip galleries, the auction houses, the most serious collectors alive — has spent the last four years quietly building infrastructure for the thing they publicly claim is dead.

This isn't a "moon soon" piece. I'm not going to tell you the floor of your favorite PFP is about to 50x. I'm going to walk you through:

What the gatekeepers of the art world have already done while everyone was watching the price chart

Why every art movement that ever mattered was treated as a joke for decades before it wasn't

Why the math on this — actually doing the math — makes the bear case impossible to defend

Bookmark it if you have to. By the end you'll understand why I think buying generational digital art at these prices is one of the most asymmetric bets available right now in any asset class.

This isn't really an article about prices. It's an article about a property system the world hasn't priced yet.

Let's begin.

I — The Market You Think Is Unshakeable Is Actually Shrinking

The traditional art market is $59.6 billion. That's the number Art Basel and UBS published in their 2026 report, written by Dr. Clare McAndrew, who has been the most respected analyst of this sector for over a decade.

It sounds enormous. It is enormous, by NFT standards. But here's what nobody tells you about that number:

It's down from a peak of $67.8 billion in 2022. Two consecutive years of decline before a small bounce.

The middle of the market (works under $50,000) has been collapsing for over a decade.

At public auction, works priced above $1 million accounted for less than 1% of lots but 54% of value.

The Art Basel report itself flagged the most important shift coming: "the great wealth transfer." Over $80 trillion in assets passing from boomers to their kids and grandkids in the next two decades.

Read that 1% line again. The traditional art market isn't really a $60 billion market. It's a roughly $30 billion market for everyone, plus a $30 billion casino at the top where billionaires trade Basquiats and Picassos as a tax-efficient way to move capital between estates.

And that top end has a problem. The buyers are old. The dealers are old. The infrastructure is old. The kids and grandkids about to inherit eighty trillion dollars did not grow up bidding on Sotheby's catalogs.

They grew up online.

So before we even talk about NFTs, get this straight: the thing NFTs are supposedly trying to compete with is not a thriving, expanding market.

It's an aging market. A concentration problem. A generational handoff to people who don't want what's being handed to them. And that's the asset class people are calling the safe one.

At the top end, older collectors are increasingly managing estates, liquidity, and succession — not discovering new mediums.

Now let me show you what the people running it are actually doing with their own money.

II — While You Weren't Looking, the Gatekeepers Already Moved

The art world has a very specific mechanism for legitimizing a new medium. It goes like this:

A handful of artists make work in a new form.

Critics laugh. Collectors ignore them.

A few brave curators acquire the work for institutional collections.

Other museums see the acquisitions and follow.

Auction houses, sensing the institutional shift, start offering the work.

Blue-chip galleries pick up the artists.

Prices compound for a generation.

That's the playbook. It worked for photography. It worked for video art. It worked for installation art. It worked for every medium that the art world initially found "not really art."

And it is the playbook that is currently running for digital and on-chain art. Most people don't know the early stages have already happened.

Here's what's already in the permanent collections of major museums:

MoMA (New York) — Acquired Refik Anadol's Unsupervised in 2023. Hung in the lobby for almost a full year. Three million visitors saw it. The acquisition included a companion NFT and a visitor-mintable blockchain memento. Same year, MoMA also acquired Ian Cheng's 3FACE, a generative NFT that reads the contents of the owner's wallet and changes as the wallet changes. Conceptual art that literally cannot exist without blockchain.

Centre Pompidou (Paris) — France's most important museum of modern art acquired 18 NFT works from 13 artists in 2023. The collection includes a CryptoPunk, an Autoglyph, work by Sarah Meyohas, Rafaël Rozendaal, John Gerrard. The curator who put it together, Marcella Lista, framed it as the natural continuation of the museum's existing collection of Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, Vito Acconci, Nam June Paik. NFTs slot into that lineage, not against it.

LACMA (Los Angeles) — Holds one of the most serious collections of on-chain art in the world. In February 2023, the collector Cozomo de' Medici donated 22 generative and blockchain works including a CryptoPunk, a Dmitri Cherniak Ringer, and pieces by Tyler Hobbs — the largest blockchain-art donation any U.S museum had ever received.

Separately, Erick Calderon known as @ArtOnBlockchain  the founder of Art Blocks — donated the final Chromie Squiggle, the originating work of the entire on-chain generative art movement, directly to the museum. LACMA also runs the first dedicated digital art acquisition fund for women artists at any American museum.

I know this is a lot of museums. Stay with me. The point isn't any single one — it's the pattern.

ICA Miami — Started earlier than anyone. They received CryptoPunk #5293 from a trustee, making it the first NFT acquired by any major museum, full stop. In 2022, Yuga Labs gifted them a second Punk and launched the Punks Legacy Project a formal initiative to place CryptoPunks in major museums worldwide.

The Whitney — Has been quietly acquiring digital and net art for years, including two Rafaël Rozendaal works in their permanent collection. They've been running a digital exhibition platform called Artport since 2001.

Buffalo AKG Art Museum — Hosted "Peer to Peer" in late 2022, the first survey of blockchain art mounted by an American museum. The historical argument the curator made is the one you should remember: in 1910, the same museum hosted the first photography exhibition in any American museum. People still didn't think photography was art in 1910 — three-quarters of a century after the medium was invented.

The Guggenheim — Platformed Jenny Holzer's Light Line in 2024, a 900-foot scrolling LED installation incorporating AI-generated text. The Guggenheim explicitly bringing AI-aided digital practice into its rotunda is part of the same wave.

Add Centre Pompidou, MoMA, LACMA, ICA Miami, Whitney, Buffalo AKG, and Guggenheim together and you have the institutional spine of contemporary art in the United States and Europe and all of them have made formal commitments to digital and on-chain art in the last four years.

People who are not paying attention will tell you the institutions don't care.

The institutions moved in public. The market just ignored it because floors were down.

"The history of conceptual art constitutes a particularly important reference. Conceptual art enabled striking progress in the dematerialisation of artworks."— Marcella Lista, Centre Pompidou

III — Every Art Movement You Now Take Seriously Was a Joke First

This is the part of the argument that crypto people skip and art people instinctively understand.

In 1863, the Paris Salon the official, government-sanctioned annual exhibition that decided what counted as legitimate art rejected over 2,000 paintings. The rejected work was so much, and so loudly complained about, that Napoleon III ordered a parallel exhibition called the Salon des Refusés. People showed up in droves, but they showed up to laugh. Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was the centerpiece of the rejected work, and critics treated it as a vulgar embarrassment.

That painting is now considered one of the foundational works of modern art. It hangs at the Musée d'Orsay. It's worth, if it ever sold, a number that doesn't really make sense to write down.

In 1874, eleven years after the Salon des Refusés, a group of artists who had given up trying to get into the official Salon held their own exhibition in a borrowed studio in Paris. The show drew about 3,500 visitors total. The official Salon that year drew over 500,000. A critic named Louis Leroy reviewed the show by mocking the title of one of Monet's paintings Impression, Sunrise and used the word "impressionists" as an insult.

The name stuck. They kept the insult.

It took until 1987 over a hundred years after the Salon des Refusés for a single Van Gogh painting to set the all-time auction record for any modern work, breaking through prices that had previously belonged exclusively to Old Masters. Sunflowers sold at Christie's for nearly $40 million.

Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. Now his work routinely passes $100 million at auction.

That gap is what every art revolution looks like, every time, without exception.

The lesson is not that recognition always takes a century. The lesson is that ridicule often comes first, institutional adoption comes second, and market repricing comes later.

Take Pop Art. In July 1962, Andy Warhol's first solo show of the Campbell's Soup Cans opened at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. A neighboring gallery stocked actual Campbell's soup cans in its window with a sign that read "the real thing twenty nine cents," as a public mockery. Five of the thirty two paintings sold. The gallerist, Irving Blum, ended up buying back the entire set himself for a thousand dollars.

That set of thirty two soup cans is now one of MoMA's most prized holdings. A single canvas from the series sold privately for over nine million dollars.

The grocery store is forgotten.

Take Conceptual Art. In 1967, Sol LeWitt published his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art in Artforum. The founding sentence: "the idea becomes a machine that makes the art." Most of the art world treated this as fringe philosophy. The early conceptual artists deliberately produced uncollectible work protocols, instructions, certificates partly as a critique of the gallery system. They were trying to escape the market.

Sol LeWitt's auction record is now over $1.6 million. His wall drawings which are literally just sets of instructions executed by other people are in every major museum in the world.

A wall drawing is, conceptually, a smart contract. Someone wrote the rules. Someone else runs them. The "art" lives in the protocol.

He invented the framework that on-chain generative art runs on, fifty years before there was a chain to run it on.

Now look at how long each of these took. This is the part that should make you sit up:

Impressionism — From rejection in 1863 to first record-breaking modernist auction in 1987. A hundred and twenty four years.

Pop Art — From grocery store mockery in 1962 to MoMA permanent collection by the late 1960s. Roughly fifty years to multimillion dollar resale.

Conceptual Art — From 1967 manifesto to first million-dollar auction prices in the early 2000s. Roughly thirty five years.

NFT art — Quantum, the work most people credit as the first NFT, was minted in 2014. CryptoPunks launched in 2017 by @matthall2000 and @pents90. The first major auction of NFT art at Christie's was in 2021. Seven years.

Seven years.

The Impressionists held eight exhibitions before the world even knew what to call them. The first wave of NFT artists is still working. Most of them are still alive. Most of them are still mid career. And the same playbook that priced Manet, Van Gogh, Warhol, and LeWitt is already running on them in the background.

Impressionism took decades to go from ridicule to billions in market value. Conceptual art faced the same resistance.

The pattern is: new medium emerges, establishment dismisses it, a critical mass of creators and collectors embrace it, then institutions follow, then money floods in.

NFTs are just further along that curve than people realize.

"The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."— Sol LeWitt, 1967

He was talking about wall drawings. He could have been describing a smart contract.

IV — The Blue-Chip Galleries Have Already Voted

If you want to know which artists will be canonized in twenty years, don't watch the auction prices. Watch which galleries take them on.

The blue-chip gallery system Pace, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner controls who gets the museum shows, who gets the institutional placements, and ultimately who gets included in the canon.

These galleries are the most conservative actors in the art world. They sign artists they expect to still matter in 50 years. Their entire business is reputation insurance for collectors holding work for generations. So when they move, it means something.

Pace Gallery, founded in 1960, represents the estates of Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg, and Sol LeWitt himself.

Sol LeWitt. The artist most closely associated with the conceptual lineage NFT art descends from.

Pace launched a dedicated NFT and Web3 platform called Pace Verso in November 2021. They have since released NFT projects with established stars across their roster:

Jeff Koons (sculptures sent to the moon)

Maya Lin

Trevor Paglen

teamLab

DRIFT

Tara Donovan

Lucas Samaras

John Gerrard

Loie Hollowell

Leo Villareal

Random International

Read that list. These are not crypto-native artists. These are the established stars of contemporary art releasing first time NFTs through a top-three blue chip gallery.

Then in March 2023, Pace did something even more telling. They gave Tyler Hobbs a generative artist born and raised inside the on-chain art world a solo show at their flagship New York space. Twelve large paintings derived from his QQL algorithm, presented in the same room that has shown Rothko and Calder.

The QQL mint passes had sold for $17 million the previous September. The secondary market for them was at $28 million a month later, in the middle of a brutal crypto bear market.

A Pace gallery solo show for a generative NFT artist is not a publicity stunt. It's a vote.

And Pace is not alone:

Lehmann Maupin became the first commercial gallery to accept cryptocurrency as payment.

Hauser & Wirth has shown Jenny Holzer's NFT-adjacent work.

Gagosian has accepted crypto for sales.

Sotheby's launched its dedicated Metaverse marketplace in 2021 and has done over $100 million in NFT sales since while maintaining on-chain royalty payments for artists at exactly the moment when most marketplaces abandoned them.

Christie's launched Christie's 3.0 in October 2022, the first fully on chain auction platform from a legacy auction house.

The auction houses and the blue chip galleries do not have to do this. They have plenty of business without crypto. They are doing it because the smart people in the most conservative corners of the art world have looked at the data and concluded that this is where the next twenty five years of collecting are going to happen.

V — The Receipts

Mike Winkelmann made one digital drawing every single day for over thirteen years. He posted them online. Almost nobody cared. He had a small following, no gallery representation, no museum interest, and no place in the traditional art world.

Then in March 2021, Christie's auctioned a single file containing all 5,000 of those drawings stitched together. It sold for $69.3 million. He goes by Beeple.

Now let me put the rest of the data in one place so you can see it.

Beeple @beeple , Everydays: The First 5000 Days — $69.3M at Christie's, March 2021. The first purely digital NFT artwork ever offered by a major auction house. Made Beeple instantly the third most expensive living artist in the world by auction record.

Pak - @muratpak , The Merge — Generated $91.8M in 2021, arguably the highest public sale total for a living artist, though the comparison is debated because the work was sold in many units.

Beeple, HUMAN ONE — $29M at Christie's, November 2021. A hybrid physical digital sculpture with a dynamic NFT component.

Dmitri Cherniak @dmitricherniak , Ringers #879 ("The Goose") — $6.2M at Sotheby's, June 2023, deep into the bear market. Second highest auction price ever for a generative artwork. The full Sotheby's GRAILS auction that day brought in around $11M and set eight new artist records. This wasn't 2021 hype money. This was 2023 conviction money during a crypto winter.

Tyler Hobbs - @tylerxhobbs , Fidenza #725 — Over $1M at Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction, May 2023. Five times its high estimate.

XCOPY - @XCOPYART , Right-click and Save As Guy — Around $7M on SuperRare in late 2021. Multiple of his works have crossed multimillion dollar marks.

Refik Anadol - @refikanadol , Beyond the MoMA acquisition, became the first artist ever to project on the exterior of the Las Vegas Sphere in September 2023, with a four month residency. Before the Sphere, his work had been projected on the Walt Disney Concert Hall, on Casa Batlló, at the Venice Architecture Biennale. He was Google's first artist in residence in 2016.

These are not isolated outliers. They are a category.

There is now a meaningful population of working digital artists with auction records in the seven and eight figures, museum acquisitions on three continents, and gallery representation at the highest tier of the contemporary art world.

That population did not exist five years ago.

The hype is gone. The infrastructure is not. And the people building it aren't waiting for you to figure that out.

VI — The New Medici Are Already Collecting

If you want to know what the future market for an asset class looks like, find the people who are accumulating during the bear.

There is a collector who calls themselves Cozomo de' Medici. The name is not an accident.

The original Medici funded Botticelli, Michelangelo, Donatello — when those names were unproven and the medium was new. The returns on those bets, calculated forward, are essentially infinite.

The Medici understood, at a moment when nobody else did, that the medium was changing and the people who got there first would shape the canon.

Cozomo de' Medici donated 22 generative artworks to LACMA in February 2023. The literal Medici reference is the entire thesis. They are betting that on chain art will be remembered the way the Florentine Renaissance is remembered.

And they are not alone:

Punk6529 — The pseudonymous collector who bought The Goose for $6.2M. Runs a museum district in the metaverse displaying over two thousand pieces. Personal collection valued, at peak, at over $20M. Has been writing publicly for years that NFTs are not a trade they are a new system for owning digital culture.

Flamingo DAO — A collective of about a hundred members that pooled capital starting October 2020. They hold the only complete attribute set of CryptoPunks in existence. They hold a complete set of Autoglyphs. They hold an Alien Punk that was bought for around $750,000 in 2021 and is now worth around $13M. Peak portfolio valuation: a billion dollars.

PleasrDAO — Bought the only in existence Wu-Tang Clan album from the U.S. federal government for $4M after it was seized from Martin Shkreli. Bought Edward Snowden's Stay Free NFT for over $5M. Bought the original Doge meme NFT and fractionalized it. Backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

These are not retail speculators, not casual buyers. They are collectors and collectives with enough capital, conviction, and cultural literacy to keep buying after the hype disappeared treating NFT collecting as a fundable thesis.

Add the institutional collectors who are pseudonymous, the family offices that have been quietly accumulating, the fact that Christie's now sees enough on-chain bidding to justify a dedicated platform and you have a picture that does not match the public narrative of "NFTs are dead."

NFTs are accumulating. They're just accumulating with people who do not post their portfolios on Twitter every day.

The Medici reference is the entire trade:

Find the medium that the institutions of the future will want to collect, before the institutions of the future know they want it, and buy the foundational works while they're still cheap relative to their eventual significance.

That's what the original Medici did.

That's what @CozomoMedici , @punk6529 , @FLAMINGODAO , and @PleasrDAO are doing right now.

VII — The Reframe

If you've made it this far, you already know where this is going. But let me make it impossible to unsee.

The traditional art market is shrinking, concentrated, and aging. Its primary buyers are old. Its infrastructure is built for a generation that did not grow up online. The next generation, who did, is about to inherit eighty trillion dollars from them.

Several of the most important contemporary art institutions in the U.S. and Europe have already made formal commitments to digital and on-chain art.

Every major art movement of the last hundred and fifty years was treated as a joke for decades before it was taken seriously. Depending where you start the clock, NFT art is only 7 to 12 years. We are in 1874, not 1987.

The blue-chip galleries have voted. Pace gave Tyler Hobbs a solo show. Sotheby's runs a dedicated digital art platform. Christie's runs a fully on chain auction venue.

The auction prices exist. Beeple at $69M. Pak at $91M. Cherniak at $6.2M in the depths of the bear. Anadol projecting on the Las Vegas Sphere.

The collectors are accumulating. Flamingo, PleasrDAO, 6529, Cozomo, the family offices nobody knows about.

Here's what most people miss about NFTs.

They think it's a trading category. It isn't. It's a property system. Before NFTs, digital culture had infinite distribution and zero ownership. Everything spread, nothing could actually be held, and all the value flowed to the platforms instead of the people who made or collected the work. 

NFTs flipped that. Culture can now spread infinitely and be owned finitely, at the same time. 

That's the part that matters. Art has always priced on three things provenance, story, and cultural relevance and on chain ownership doesn't replace any of them. 

It upgrades all three.

Scarce art with social consensus on a blockchain is the new scarce land, and the people accumulating it now are doing what every generation of serious collectors has done at the start of every medium that ended up mattering.

And here's the single thing that locks the entire thesis in place:

On-chain art is the first major art category where ownership history can be programmatic, public, and timestamped from inception.

It does not solve every problem — copyright, storage, authorship, and cultural value still matter — but it solves the provenance problem better than the traditional art market ever has.

The traditional art market loses billions every year to forgeries, lost provenance, and disputed attributions. The Knoedler Gallery in New York — the oldest gallery in America, 165 years old — sold $80 million worth of fake Rothkos and Pollocks before being shut down in 2011. Even the Salvator Mundi that sold for $450 million at Christie's is officially labeled as "by Leonardo da Vinci, though this is disputed."

On chain art does not have this problem. The provenance is the medium. Every previous owner is verifiable. Every transaction is timestamped. Every smart contract is auditable.

For the first time in history, a piece of art and its complete history of ownership are the same object, mathematically.

You can right-click and save the JPEG. You cannot right-click and save the provenance. That's the whole game.

This is the dematerialization that Sol LeWitt wrote about in 1967, finally completed.

The idea is the machine. The machine makes the art. The chain remembers everything.

If you actually map the data the museum acquisitions, the auction records, the gallery representation, the collector base, the historical timelines, the demographics of inheritance, the structural problems of the traditional market, and the property system advantages of on chain provenance there is no honest reading where NFT art is going to stay at $2 billion.

Two billion is the current market cap of an asset class that has:

The most prestigious museums in the world acquiring its foundational works

The most conservative galleries in the world signing its artists

The most sophisticated collectors in the world quietly accumulating

The cleanest provenance system ever invented

A generational tailwind of trillions in inheritance about to land in the hands of buyers who have spent their entire lives looking at screens

The bet is not on prices. The bet is on the medium.

And the medium has already won the only argument that matters: the institutions that decide what counts as art have already decided.

The serious part of NFT art has survived the speculative crash and is being institutionalized faster than most hated art movements in history.

The bear case says NFTs died because the speculative market collapsed.

The institutional record says something else: the speculation died, but the medium survived.

I'm not saying every PFP comes back. Most won’t. That does not mean every 2021 collection matters. Most don’t. It means the foundational works of on-chain art are being sorted, collected, contextualized, and canonized in real time.

The trade is not “NFTs are back.”

The trade is that digital art is entering art history while most people are still pricing it like a dead retail mania.

In 1965, you could buy a Warhol for the price of a used car. Those same paintings now sell for nine figures. Foundational digital art today is priced exactly where Warhol was in 1965. This is not a theoretical observation. It's a number you can look up.

The Salon mocked Manet. The grocery store mocked Warhol. The people mocking Beeple, Anadol, Hobbs, and Cherniak sound very similar to the people who mocked every new medium before it hardened into art history.

History has been very consistent about who ends up looking stupid in this exchange.

You've now read 4,000 words explaining which side of it you're on.

The only question left is whether you act on it before the people who didn't read this do.

- Van

## Comments

**mishaderidder.eth**: Despite the article says it’s not, it still feels like a very loooong pump. But since it’s so elaborate I thought well let’s give it a chance :)