A slew of celebrity endorsements helped inflate a multi-billion dollar bubble over the past year, but cryptocurrencies are crashing and some fear NFTs could be next.
NFTs are token linked to digital images, collectable items, avatars in games or property and objects in the burgeoning virtual world of the metaverse.
The likes of Serena Williams, Gwyneth Paltrow and Paris Hilton have boasted about owning NFTs, and many under 30 have been enticed to gamble for the chance of making a quick profit.
The signs for NFTs are mixed at the moment and the whole sector is suffering a rout with all major cryptocurrencies falling in value.
The number of NFTs traded in the first quarter of this year decreased by over 50 percent compared to the previous quarter, according to analysis firm Non-Fungible.
The market was digesting the vast amount of NFTs created last year, they reckoned, with the resale market just getting off the ground.
In May, the watch firm CryptoSlam reported a dramatic tail-off, with just $31 million spent on art and collectibles in the week to May 15, the lowest figure all year.
A symbol of the struggle is the forlorn attempt to resell an NFT of Jack Dorsey'sDorsey's first tweet.
Dorsey sold the NFT for almost $3 million last year, but the new owner can't find anyone willing to pay more than $20,000.
Molly White, a prominent critic of the criptosphere, told AFP there were many possible reasons for the downturn.
She said it could be a general decrease in hype, it could be a fear of scams after so many high-profile ones, or it could be people tightening their belts.
The reputation of the industry has been hammered for much of the year.
The main exchange, OpenSea, admitted in January that more than 80 percent of the NFTs created with its free tool were fraudulent - many of them copies of other NFTs or famous artworks reproduced without permission.
There is a lot of everything on OpenSea, said Olivier Lerner, co-author of the book NFT Mine d'Or NFT Gold Mine. It is a huge site and you really don't know what you're buying. LooksRare, an NFT exchange that overtook OpenSea for volume of sales this year, has had similar problems as its rival.
According to CryptoSlam, 95 percent of the transactions on its platform were found to be fake.
Users were selling NFTs to themselves because LooksRare was offering token with every transaction - no matter what you were buying.
The amounts lost to scams this year have been eye-watering.
The owners of Axie Infinity, a game played by millions in the Philippines and elsewhere and as a key driver of the NFT market, managed to lose more than $500 million in a single swindle.
Eric Barbry, a lawyer for AFP, said that as soon as you have a new technology, you immediately have fraudsters circling.
He pointed out that the NFT market has no dedicated regulation, so law enforcement agencies are left to cobble together a response using existing frameworks.
Molly White said strong regulation could help eliminate extreme speculation but that could, in turn rob NFTs of their main appeal - that they can bring quick profits.
She said that less hype would be a good thing - in its current form, NFT trading is enormously risky and probably unwise for the average person.
NFTs are often likened to the traditional art market because they have no inherent utility and their prices fluctuated wildly depending on trends and hype.
He said it's like a lottery for those who are looking for big profits from NFTs.