TL;DR
- The NFT market has now posted five consecutive quarters of declining trading volumes, moving just $823 million in Q2 2025 — a sharp drop from $4 billion in the same period last year.
- The Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Collections Index is down 52% since January, failing to mirror the partial recovery seen in Bitcoin and other tokens.
- Donald Trump sold out four collections, but those isolated sales weren’t enough to reverse the broader collapse in the digital collectibles market.
The NFT market continues to deepen its retreat, marking five straight quarters of declining trading volumes.
In the second quarter of 2025, total volume fell to $823 million, well below the $4 billion recorded in the same period the previous year, according to DappRadar data. The drop confirms that this segment hasn’t managed to recover from the collapse it suffered in 2022.
That year, annual volume had surpassed $50 billion, fueled by the craze for digital collectibles, viral memes, and celebrity endorsements. However, demand plummeted as prices fell and the highest-profile projects lost value. The decline accelerated in 2024, when annual volume contracted by 19%, setting a historic low for NFT traders.
The Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Collections Index Fell 52%
Even though the U.S. presidential election briefly revived activity in the broader crypto market, NFTs failed to ride that wave. The Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Collections Index, which tracks the performance of the most recognized collections, has dropped 52% since January. While Bitcoin and other tokens posted partial rebounds, digital collectibles continued to slide.
Trump Is the Market’s Outlier
Among the rare exceptions to the decline is Donald Trump, who launched four separate collections featuring his image, ranging from superhero portraits to illustrations of him holding a symbolic Bitcoin. Each collection sold out within hours, and last year, he hosted a dinner for buyers of his tokens. Still, those one-off sales weren’t enough to shift the market’s overall trend.
Today, the sector faces its lowest activity levels since the 2022 peak and struggles to regain investor interest, even as other cryptocurrencies partially recover. NFTs continue to function as digital certificates of ownership for unique blockchain-based assets, but pricing and trading volumes suggest market abandonment is only growing.
Without new proposals offering a combination of value, utility, and genuine commercial appeal beyond avatars and meme collectibles, NFTs seem destined to remain on the fringes of the crypto ecosystem
