Non-fungible tokens went from obscurity to a speculative frenzy to near-silence in a few years. Trading volumes fell by the vast majority from peak. What survived is worth identifying because it points at what the technology was actually for.
What collapsed
Digital collectibles as investment. Profile pictures selling for the price of houses. The premise that scarcity of a token implied value of an image anyone could copy.
That was a speculative bubble with a technology attached, and it ended the way bubbles do.
What persisted
Tickets. A ticket that cannot be counterfeited, that can be resold with the issuer taking a cut, and that can carry perks. Several venues and events use this and it works.
In-game assets, where the item genuinely exists inside the game and the token represents ownership across sessions. Modest, functional, and not what the hype was about.
Provenance records for physical goods – luxury items, art, collectibles – where the token is a certificate rather than the asset.
And membership credentials, where holding a token grants access.
The pattern
Everything that survived is a token representing something outside itself. Everything that collapsed was a token that was supposed to be valuable on its own.
The reputational cost
The term became synonymous with fraud and speculation, which makes the surviving applications reluctant to use it. Several now describe the same technology with different words.
Where it ends
Boring infrastructure for verifiable ownership records, used without being named. Which is what most useful technology becomes.