Insights / Market & Hype

How NFTs Became a Casino

By Amir Soleymani • November 19, 2025 • 6 min read

NFTs were supposed to revolutionize art and ownership. Instead, for a while, they became a casino for speculators, a playground for market manipulators, and a goldmine for the rich. I say that as someone who loves this technology — which is exactly why the casino years are worth being honest about.

From a movement to a market

The original promise was simple and good: verifiable ownership for collectors, and royalties that paid artists every time their work resold. Somewhere along the way the conversation stopped being about art and started being about price. Profile-picture projects, floor prices, and flipping replaced the work itself.

The hype machine

The media did not just report the boom — it manufactured it. Headlines turned a niche experiment into a gold rush, celebrity endorsements poured in, and fear of missing out did the rest. Then, when the market turned, the same outlets reported the crash as if they had merely been watching, rarely acknowledging their part in amplifying the hype. Underneath it all ran practices most buyers never saw: wash trading to fake demand, and rug pulls that vanished with the money.

The sale that defined an era

No single moment captures this better than the $69.3 million sale of Beeple's “Everydays” at Christie's in March 2021. On the surface, it was a digital artist's coronation. Look closer and it reads more like a strategic maneuver. The winning bidder, Vignesh Sundaresan — known as MetaKovan — was not only a collector. He ran Metapurse, a fund that already held a bundle of Beeple's work and had issued B20 tokens tied to it.

In the weeks before the auction, B20 surged roughly 1,100% — from about $2 to $28 — then collapsed below $3 by May. The record-breaking sale doubled as an advertisement for a financial product: the closest thing to owning a piece of a $69 million Beeple. It was a textbook case of buy the rumour, sell the news.

Why this still matters

The casino did real damage — to artists who were told easy money was guaranteed, and to collectors who learned otherwise. But naming what happened is not the same as giving up on the technology. It is how you separate what was only hype from what was actually built.

This essay draws on my book Fools and JPEGs: The NFT Scam That Might Actually Work.