NFTs in 2025: When the IP halo fades, liquidity becomes the only touchstone

If you’ve felt struggles in the NFT market over the past year, it’s not an illusion. A core fact is that positive developments for an IP do not automatically translate into increased value for its related NFTs or tokens. Currently, the total market capitalization of the entire crypto gaming sector even falls short of the total amount invested by venture capital firms in this space. 2025 has become a year of collective transformation for NFT projects, with many distancing themselves from the “NFT” concept.

By 2025, the NFT market had already shown signs of decline and failed to reverse the downward trend throughout the year. Trading volumes across various chains continued to shrink, with market activity increasingly concentrated in a few popular IPs and incentive programs. Data clearly reflects this contraction: the total NFT trading volume for the year was only $5.5 billion, far below the level in 2024.

In the remaining market activity, $ETH solidified its dominant position. About 45% of NFT trading volume in 2025 occurred on the Ethereum mainnet. $BTC and $SOL briefly attracted attention during 2023-2024 due to “inscriptions” and the SOL NFT craze, but they have now lost momentum. $BTC’s share of NFT trading volume dropped to around 16%, less than half of last year; $SOL’s share fell into single digits. The market has become smaller and increasingly centered around $ETH.

Although overall trading volume declined, product-level developments in 2025 were not static. One of the most notable examples is Zora. In late February 2025, it launched a “token” upgrade, where user-generated content would be minted as an independent ERC-20 “token” with a fixed supply of 1 billion, no longer the one-of-a-kind NFT. This essentially turned creator posts into more liquid, frictionless micro-tokens.

Major NFT marketplaces, especially OpenSea and Magic Eden, continued to position themselves as multi-asset platforms. Beyond their core market businesses, they heavily expanded token exchange features and more versatile trading tools. For example, after ceding the top spot to Blur for about three years, OpenSea regained the number one position in 2025. In early 2025, OpenSea’s share of Ethereum/EVM NFT market trading volume was about 36%, while Blur accounted for 58%. By the end of 2025, OpenSea’s share rose to over 67%, while Blur’s fell below 24%.

Against the backdrop of cooling overall market activity, only a few key events truly influenced the narrative in 2025. The launch of Magic Eden’s platform token and its incentive program was one of the main catalysts driving market activity that year. However, this revealed a core reality of 2025: incentive programs may guide existing liquidity, but in a contracting market, they struggle to generate new liquidity.

Another major trend was that some leading NFT series began issuing replaceable “ecosystem tokens.” Notable examples include Pudgy Penguins’ $PENGU, Doodles’ $DOOD, and Azuki’s $ANIME. However, their price trajectories vividly illustrate the difficulty of maintaining “cultural concept coins” hype in 2025.

$PENGU launched at the end of 2024, performed strongly at the start of the new year, with prices rising nearly 40% in the first week, but then plummeted over 90% within three months. It rebounded strongly in Q2, with valuation increasing tenfold in three months, but then declined again in the second half of the year. As of the report, $PENGU had fallen over 60% year-to-date.

$DOOD showed a similar pattern, dropping nearly 75% within less than two months after launch, then entering consolidation, and rebounding about 160% from September to October 2025. However, this rebound was not sustained, and by the end of 2025, $DOOD was down nearly 50% for the year.

$ANIME, on the other hand, stood out because it almost never rebounded. After its launch in late January 2025, it immediately declined, and unlike $PENGU or $DOOD, it never experienced a meaningful upward phase. Its price continued to decline throughout the year, with a total drop of over 90%. Overall, these three tokens had an annual return of about -67%.

The key conclusion is not that the ecosystem token model itself is flawed, but that the market in 2025 lacked structural demand for “culture-driven tokens.” In an environment of tight liquidity and investors increasingly valuing clear cash flows or protocol utility, tokens that rely heavily on brand recognition to support their value find it difficult to sustain attractiveness.

If any NFT series persisted in building during the weak market of 2025, Pudgy Penguins was undoubtedly one of the best. From a branding and promotion perspective, the project navigated the busiest year in the space. However, despite continuous positive developments at the IP level, the floor price of Pudgy Penguins NFTs fell by about 75% during the year. Meanwhile, its ecosystem token $PENGU also performed poorly, declining about 60% in 2025.

Pudgy’s case reveals a common structural challenge faced by NFT projects and IPs: positive developments for the IP do not automatically translate into increased value for their NFTs or tokens. Consumers engage with brands through toys, shows, and collaborations, but they may never access the blockchain assets that originally launched the brand.

As many NFT projects shifted toward issuing replaceable tokens, some native token communities went against the trend. Hyperliquid’s Hypurr NFT is a typical example. On the secondary market, its initial floor price exceeded $55,000, with a historical high of about $79,000, but it gradually declined to around $28,000.

Hypurr’s example shows that in a mature community with proven product-market fit, building a “token→NFT” pathway remains feasible. But it also emphasizes that if these NFTs are to retain value beyond initial hype, their role and positioning must be clearly defined.

Even in a quiet year, CryptoPunks briefly drew attention again. The series’ floor price rose about 40% between July and August 2025, peaking at around 54 $ETH in mid-July. But afterward, the price nearly halved, falling back to around 30 $ETH as of the report.

Not only the price fluctuations are noteworthy, but also the changing correlation with $ETH. From early 2025 until the rebound in July, the correlation coefficient between Punk floor prices and $ETH was about -0.28, indicating a slight negative correlation. During the three-week rebound, it rose slightly to 0.24. A significant change occurred after the peak, with the correlation coefficient sharply increasing to 0.87.

This indicates that CryptoPunks essentially regained their role as high-beta assets of $ETH. This is a typical post-bubble phenomenon: once the series-specific catalysts fade, market participants reframe it as a leveraged tool to bet on Ethereum’s price movements.

Since the Axie Infinity craze, the combination of NFTs and gaming has been a major investment theme, but 2025 data shows that this sector has yet to realize the massive investments it attracted. The annual funding for this sector in 2025 was only about $1 billion, down roughly 65% from 2024. Meanwhile, the total market cap of NFT/gaming tokens declined over 60% year-to-date.

More intriguingly, the total market cap of NFT/gaming tokens is now about $14 billion, lower than the total historical funding raised in this sector (around $19 billion). This inversion—fundraising exceeding token market cap—reflects that many projects, despite raising large amounts of capital, struggle to achieve sustainable user adoption.

Looking ahead to 2026, the data from 2025 points to a “K-shaped” development in the NFT, NFT-related IP, and token industry: a small subset of projects will continue to build audiences and occasionally trigger liquidity waves, while the vast majority of series and ecosystems will remain subdued in attention and price.

Under a basic scenario, NFT trading volume will stay moderate, with market activity concentrated in the “upper half” of the “K,” such as Pudgy Penguins, CryptoPunks, and ecosystems like Pokémon trading cards that have clear user bases, offline distribution channels, or mature monetization models.

The “lower half” of the “K” includes many NFT series launched between 2021 and 2024, characterized by light trading, declining floor prices, and token experiments that only caused brief rebounds with little lasting effect. One of the core lessons of 2025 is that positive developments for the IP do not automatically lead to increased value for related NFTs or tokens.

The ownership certificates (NFTs/tokens) initially used to launch these brands are just one part of the entire value system, increasingly coexisting with mainstream channels like retail, streaming, and social media that bring major audiences and revenue. For investors and builders, the most prudent attitude is to remain highly selective and optimistic. The space is now smaller, more concentrated, and more demanding than before. But within this more focused track, projects that tightly integrate on-chain assets with real products, revenue, and communities may still find growth opportunities, even though the era of NFT-wide price surges has passed.