NFTs Aren't Dead, But Most of Them Are Worth Close to Zero. Here's the Actual Volume Data
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6 min read
In April 2022, a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT's floor price (the cheapest one listed for sale in the whole collection) hit an all time high of 152 ETH, worth about $430,000 that day (Bitcoin News; The Block). Today that same floor sits around 8 ETH, about $19,500 to $20,500 (CoinGecko; Forbes, retrieved 24 August 2026). That's a drop of roughly 95%. If you're searching for real NFT market volume data because you're tired of "NFTs are dead" hot takes, the actual numbers say something more specific: dollar volume collapsed, but trading itself never stopped, and most of what's left is worth close to nothing.
Two numbers get thrown around constantly in NFT coverage, and neither means quite what people assume.
Floor price is the price of the single cheapest NFT currently listed for sale in a collection. It is not what your specific NFT would sell for, and it is not an average. If almost every ape is unlisted and one owner panics and lists theirs cheap, that low price becomes the whole collection's "floor," even though nobody else is selling anywhere near it.
Trading volume is the total dollar value of everything that actually sold in a given period, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Unlike floor price, it reflects real completed trades rather than an asking price, which makes it the better signal for whether a market is genuinely active.
An NFT "market cap," when a tracker quotes one, is usually just floor price multiplied by how many items exist in the collection. That's a rough estimate, not a real number, since it assumes every holder could sell at the floor price at once. For an illiquid collectible, that almost never happens.
OpenSea, still the biggest NFT marketplace at the time, confirmed crossing $5 billion in trading volume in a single month for the first time in January 2022 (Hypebeast; Decrypt; CoinDesk). That one month, on one marketplace, is the number the "NFTs are dead" comparisons are usually measuring against.
The most recent full quarter with published industry data is Q3 2025 (July to September 2025). DappRadar's own State of the Dapp Industry report for that quarter recorded $1.58 billion in NFT trading volume across the market, with 18.1 million NFTs sold, a 158% jump in sales from the previous quarter (DappRadar). Zooming into October 2025 alone, the single month inside that quarter, DappRadar reported $546 million in volume (up 30% from September), 10.1 million sales (a record for 2025, up 28% month over month), and 820,945 active traders (DappRadar).
| Metric | Peak (January 2022) | Most recent reported |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly trading volume | ~$5.0B (OpenSea alone) | $546M (DappRadar, October 2025) |
| Monthly NFTs sold | Not separately reported at the time | 10.1M (DappRadar, October 2025, a 2025 record) |
| BAYC floor price | 152 ETH, ~$430K (29 April 2022) | ~8 ETH, ~$19.5K to $20.5K (24 August 2026) |
Two things happened at once: dollar volume fell by roughly 90% from that single peak month, and the number of individual trades kept rising. Also worth knowing: because floor prices are quoted in ETH, part of any swing comes from ETH's own price moving, not just from what buyers think the NFT itself is worth. You can check ETH's own price history separately to see how much of a floor-price move is the coin and how much is the collection.
A September 2023 study by dappGambl, using data from CoinMarketCap and NFT Scan, examined 73,257 NFT collections and found that 69,795 of them, about 95%, had a market cap of exactly 0 ETH (dappGambl, via CryptoNews). Even narrowing to what the study defined as the top-value collections, 18% still had a market cap of zero. Under 1% of the collections examined were worth more than $6,000.
That study is dated and it hasn't been repeated at the same scale since, so treat the exact 95% figure as a 2023 snapshot rather than today's number. But the broader pattern lines up with where the market sits now: CoinGecko's own Global NFT Stats page put the entire global NFT market's combined value at roughly $1.47 billion as of 24 August 2026 (CoinGecko). Spread that across tens of thousands of collections and it confirms the same shape the 2023 study found: a small handful of collections hold almost all the value, and most hold almost none.
Divide DappRadar's own October 2025 figures, $546 million in volume across 10.1 million sales, and the average NFT sold that month for about $54. Compare that to a single Bored Ape trading for $430,000 at the 2022 peak. The market didn't just get smaller. It got cheaper and more spread out: fewer six-figure blue-chip flips, many more small, low-stakes trades.
None of this means every NFT is worthless, or that the category has no future. It means the honest read of the data is: this is a highly illiquid, highly concentrated collectible market, closer to art or watches than to a stock or an ETF you can sell in seconds at a visible market price. We wrote about that same liquidity gap for physical collectibles, and most of the same warning signs apply to NFTs too, just with an extra layer: a "floor price" that one panic-sale can move, on top of the usual collectible illiquidity.
If you already hold NFTs, the practical move is to track them the way you'd track any other illiquid collectible, separately from your liquid holdings, not blended into a portfolio return the way a stock or a fund would be. Open Explore in NetWort to see how liquid and how volatile your actual holdings are, side by side, instead of relying on a single floor-price number.