"There's light at the end of the tunnel."
by FairyBaby420
There's light at the end of the tunnel.
And it's pretty gay.
Marketplaces are shutting down. People are calling it the end. We've seen "RIP NFTs" posts last week from accounts that were mass-minting garbage in 2021.
What's actually happening is that these people are finally running out of runway. Which, honestly, took longer than we expected. A lot of people held on for years, protecting bags in a market that was never going to come back because it was never real to begin with. The prices in 2021 had nothing to do with the work. Everyone knows this. What's happening now is repricing. It hurts, it takes longer than anyone wants, and five years in, it's still not done. There's no shortcut.
The part that actually bothers us is how it flattened everything. Autoglyphs, Fidenza, CryptoPunks, whatever else you want to put on that list, projects that were genuinely exploring what generative art could do on-chain, it all got filed under the same header as 10k PFP projects that existed purely to flip. From the outside, from the traditional art world, from normies, it all looks like one thing. You can argue about what counts as real art in this space until you lose your voice. It doesn't matter. The perception is already calcified.
So what actually changes that?
Time. And people building things that understand nuance, not just from tech but also culturally. Not "building" in the sense of shipping features, but building in the sense of: does this thing have a reason to exist beyond making money for the people who made it. The people who've been here since 2021 need to start paying attention to what's happening now. If you're holding Autoglyphs or Fidenza or CryptoPunks and you have no idea what the newer generation of artists is doing, you're part of the problem. Those projects only get properly understood when they're read alongside what came after, not when they're forever grouped with Bored Apes and Pudgy Penguins in some 2021 time capsule. The context has to keep moving. If you want the outside world to see the difference, you have to see it first.
The data says this is already happening. According to the latest Art Basel and UBS report, 74% of high net worth collectors surveyed are now Millennials or Gen Z. This isn't a projection about the future. It's the present. 51% of these collectors bought a digital artwork in the past year. Among Gen Z specifically, that number is 63%. Two thirds of collectors purchased work by artists they discovered for the first time, up from 43% in 2022. And 63% bought directly from artists, more than double the rate from two years ago. Meanwhile, over $80 trillion is expected to transfer to younger generations over the next two decades. The infrastructure for what comes next is already being built by people who don't need to be convinced that digital ownership is real. They already live that way.
None of this means the current market isn't brutal. It is. But the brutality is also a filter. The people still here are either delusional or they actually believe in something. Sometimes both. The delusional ones will leave eventually. The ones who believe in something will keep creating. And quiet markets are actually good for building. When no one is watching, you can take your time. You can look at what went wrong and figure out why. You can talk to artists and collectors without everything being about the next drop. The past four years left behind a pretty clear record of what works and what doesn't, what was real and what was just liquidity dressed up as culture. We'd rather learn from that than pretend it didn't happen.
That's what we're doing at VVV. In 2025, we focused on the artist side: how collections get made, how they unfold over time, how the tools can disappear so the work can breathe. This year, we're turning toward collectors. Specifically, how secondary markets work. We spent months looking at how existing ones are built, and they're all basically the same. Same architecture, same assumptions about what trading should feel like, same separation between primary and secondary as if they're two different activities. We're trying to build something where that split doesn't exist. Where the whole lifecycle of a work, from drop to resale to whatever comes after, feels like one continuous thing instead of a transaction that ends and then another transaction that starts somewhere else. The direction is: strip everything unnecessary, question the defaults, and see if there's a version of this that actually serves the people using it instead of just routing fees.
We're not trying to rebuild the 2021 market. We don't want that market back. What we want is something that makes sense for artists who are serious about their work and collectors who actually care about what they're holding. The tech is just the part that makes it possible. The harder question is what kind of culture you build around it, what behaviors you reward, what you make easy and what you make impossible. That's where we're spending most of our time right now.
More soon.