The NFT boom: The art that disappeared

The pandemic; a strange time when interest rates plummeted, lunch conversations happened on Teams, and going to your cabin was forbidden.

When Norwegians suddenly found themselves with more money than usual, they began looking for places to invest it. According to AksjeNorge, the number of Norwegian shareholders increased by 90,000 in 2020 alone. But stocks, funds, and crypto were just the beginning.

A new phenomenon piqued our curiosity: Non-fungible tokens – or NFTs as most people call them. But what exactly is an NFT? Simply explained, it's a digital file with unique identification codes on a blockchain that makes your specific file provably unique. Think of it as a digital certificate of authenticity.

From obscure technology to billion-dollar industry

The first NFT, called "Quantum," was actually created back in 2014. But it would take six years before the technology really gained momentum.

In 2020, two things happened. First, the pandemic forced us onto digital meeting places. Twitter and the new audio blog platform Clubhouse became places where people could hang out and talk with like-minded individuals. NFT enthusiasts had already established themselves on these platforms. If you visited Twitter in 2020, you could hardly avoid posts related to NFTs.

The second decisive moment came when artist Mike Winkleman – better known as Beeple – created shockwaves in the art world. He sold a digital artwork through the prestigious auction house Christie's for a staggering 69 million dollars. The most he had previously received for a physical artwork was 100 dollars. This event opened the floodgates, and suddenly everyone wanted to ride the NFT wave.

The digital gold rush

It all quickly developed into a sort of digital Klondike – a gold rush where anyone with internet access could participate. Examples of the madness became increasingly bizarre:

• Nike sold a digital sneaker for 134,000 dollars
• Norwegian influencer Oskar Westerlin bought a drawing of a pig for 38,000 kroner, then sold it for over half a million just five months later
• New York Times journalist Kevin Roose sold an image of his own column for around six million kroner

But nothing symbolized the NFT madness better than the pixelated apes. Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) became status symbols and hot investment objects. Even artist Kygo shelled out one million kroner for his digital ape. Today, that same ape is worth around 250,000 kroner – a clear indication of how the NFT market has fared.

The bubble that burst

The pandemic years created perfect conditions for explosive growth in the NFT world:

• In 2020, the total NFT turnover was 33 million dollars
• In 2021, it shot up to 13 billion dollars
• The peak was reached in 2022 with a staggering 57 billion dollars in turnover

Then the arrow suddenly pointed downward. In 2023, trading volume plummeted by over 60 percent, and in 2024 almost nothing remained of the hype. From the height of several tens of billions of dollars, sales in 2024 have barely passed one billion dollars.

Today, almost no one talks about their digital art anymore. But does this mean the NFT concept is dead? Not necessarily. As with many overhyped technologies, NFTs are going through what technology enthusiasts call "the trough of disillusionment."

Perhaps the technology will find its natural place in the digital ecosystem when the dust settles.

Utility value

While values have plummeted and interest is waning, generative artificial intelligence has taken over as technology's new darling. Suddenly, it became more exciting to generate AI images of yourself as an action figure than to shell out for pixelated art.

But NFT technology can be used for much more than just digital collectibles. 2025 looks to be the year when the focus shifts toward "utility NFTs" – tokens with actual utility value: Luxury brands are exploring how NFTs can connect digital ownership with physical objects. An NFT linked to a luxury watch can function as a certificate of authenticity and prevent counterfeiting.

Companies like Altered Machine State (AMS) and Alethea.ai are connecting NFTs with AI agents. Through AMS, you can create, train, and sell AI agents as NFTs. Alethea goes even further by making AI agents human-like, with the ability to show emotions, facial expressions, and personality in the digital world.

The NFT glitch

This week, we were reminded that even digital values aren't immune to technical problems. 19,000 NFTs suddenly disappeared from major trading platforms like OpenSea and Blur.

The digital fashion house RTFKT (pronounced "artifact"), which was purchased by Nike in 2021, used Cloudflare's servers to store their NFT images. When RTFKT didn't renew their premium subscription with Cloudflare, they were downgraded to the free version – resulting in thousands of NFT owners losing access to their expensive artwork. Among these was the CloneX collection issued by RTFKT, where the cheapest NFT cost over 60,000 dollars. It didn't take many days before Nike was sued for over 5 million dollars by frustrated NFT owners.

The digital art boom came and went. Values collapsed and people grew tired of looking at pixelated apes. But perhaps a new NFT wave is coming – this time with more focus on practical utility than speculation. But this week's event is a reminder that even in the digital world, nothing is necessarily permanent.

And if you still own NFTs, it might be wise to check whether your provider is planning to downgrade to free versions of their services in the near future.

Are you jealous and want to spy on your partner?

Look no further! Dating company Raw has developed a smart ring that they say will create more trustful romantic relationships. But it's questionable whether they haven't taken surveillance to a new level.

The ring is supposed to track tone of voice, body temperature, and movements. This data is then fed into artificial intelligence and generates a summary. Which goes straight to your partner. Thus, you'll immediately be able to see if your partner really has to work overtime, or if something else suspicious is going on.

Creepy stuff.

Friends again

This week, tensions ran high between the White House and Amazon. According to Punchbowl News, Amazon was planning to separate tariff costs on their websites. This way, consumers would have seen how much extra they have to pay after President Donald Trump imposed massive tariffs on various Chinese goods.

Trump's press secretary, Leavitt, didn't hold back at a press conference on Tuesday. She called Amazon both "hostile" and "political." But it helps to talk things through. After a brief phone call between Trump and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, everything was rosy again.

"Jeff Bezos is very nice. He solved the problem quickly and did the right thing," said Donald Trump.

Amazon will not display tariff costs on their websites.

One app to rule them all

Sam Altman, the man behind OpenAI and ChatGPT, has plans to create a super-app. On International Workers' Day, May 1st, the rollout of the eye scanner from his other company, World, begins. The small sphere is supposed to scan your iris to ensure that it's actually you who should have access to online banking or other sensitive information. At the same time, World is planning to launch its own phone and bank card.

Altman claims to be concerned about the amount of fraud attempts that artificial intelligence enables, and that eye scanning is the safest way to protect the world's population against fraud. Now it's not just your online data that's interesting. Altman also wants biometric data.

Will AI take our jobs?

I've previously written about The Great Freeze, a kind of standstill in the American job market. An article in The Atlantic builds on this. Now, concerning numbers are emerging: Young, educated people are struggling tremendously to find jobs in the USA, and the article speculates whether artificial intelligence is seriously beginning to change the job market. I recommend reading this.

Should we say thank you?

It seemed like every lunch conversation last week was about how saying thank you and please to AI models is harmful to our planet. And that's true. Every conversation you have with a language model requires a lot of energy, and now language models are used by hundreds of millions of people, multiple times daily, every single day.

But this New York Times article points to something interesting. The way you treat artificial intelligence can spill over into how you treat other people.

"We build up norms for our behavior, and by having this type of interaction with (AI), we might become a little better or more habitually oriented toward polite behavior," says Dr. Jamie Banks, who researches human interaction with AI, to the New York Times.