Few could challenge that the Musée ds and Christie's, the luxury auction houses, piled into the NFT craze as a means of connecting with young people, especially those in the tech industry.
Now the NFT market has cratered, leading to a decline in demand. The long-standing benchmark, Bored Ape Yacht Club, has lost two-thirds of its value since March, according to data from DeFiLlama.
NFTs seem to have lost their cachet in the culture, he said. Gamers dislike them and call them scams, while celebrities appear to have dropped NFTs like a fad well past its sell-out date.
If that isn't enough, DL News reported this week that around half of the NFT trading activity on Ethereum was linked to wash trading, an unsavoury practice designed to pump the price of assets.
The Musée ds art in a different way.
The tokens are safe for owners to store them in their crypto wallets and tap them for discounts on return visits to the museum, merchandise and meals in its cafés overlooking the Seine and the Louvre. The so-called heritage tokens are hosted by Keru, a platform based on the public blockchain of Tezos.
Constance de Marliave, Musée ds development and international projects manager, told DL News.
The cultural department and National Taras Shevchenko Museum in Kyiv use blockchain and augmented reality to exhibit Ukrainian art while Russia's war continues, which is shut down by access to culture.
In July, British Museum entered an Ethereum-based metaverse, the Sandbox, where it offers NFTs in a virtual game. In February 2022, the Belvedere Museum in Vienna released a collectible NFT of the masterwork of Gustav Klimt.
Whitacre, 63, said in a statement that he had not been paid by the state for his service.
Despite their tarnished image, NFTs appear to still have a value in the art industry, even if it's just leaning into a new type of marketing.