Insights / The Future

Tools, Not Magic: What NFTs Need to Actually Work

By Amir Soleymani • February 25, 2026 • 6 min read

The loudest years of NFTs are over, and I am glad. What is left, once the speculation drains away, is the part that interested me in the first place: a technology that can prove ownership and provenance. NFTs are tools, not magic spells — and tools only matter when they solve real problems.

The end of fast money

The era of easy flips and overnight fortunes is fading. That is not the death of NFTs; it is the end of a distraction. Speculation was never the point. The technology stays promising precisely because it can do quiet, useful work that has nothing to do with hype — and the people still here after the crowd left are the ones who were always more interested in the work than the windfall.

Where real utility lives

The interesting question is no longer how high a JPEG can sell. It is which real-world problems a token can actually solve:

• Tokenizing real-world assets, from property deeds to financial instruments, so ownership is verifiable and transferable.
• Paying creators directly through music platforms built on transparent, on-chain royalties.
• Owning and moving game assets across worlds instead of being locked inside one publisher.
• Verifiable digital identity and credentials — university diplomas and certificates that cannot be faked.

Fix the plumbing first

For any of this to last, the infrastructure has to grow up. Artwork and data need durable storage on networks built to keep files alive — not links that quietly rot when a server is switched off. And assets need to move across chains rather than being trapped on one. These are unglamorous problems, which is exactly why solving them matters more than the next collection drop.

No shortcuts

The hardest lesson is also the simplest: NFTs are not a magic spell, and traditional growth still matters. Quality, trust, branding, and patience built every creative industry before this one, and they will build whatever NFTs become next. The tool is genuinely useful. It was never going to do the work for us.

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