Just caught up with something interesting from the St. Moritz crypto conference. Turns out wealthy collectors are quietly keeping the NFT market alive, even though everyone's been calling it dead.

Here's what's actually happening: monthly NFT sales are sitting around $300 million right now. Yeah, that's way down from the $1 billion monthly peak back in 2021-22, but think about it - five years ago this entire market was literally zero dollars. So saying nft dead because it's not at peak mania levels is kind of missing the bigger picture.

Yat Siu from Animoca Brands made a really solid point in an interview - wealthy digital collectors are treating NFTs exactly like traditional art or luxury goods. You've got people buying Bored Apes, Otherdeed lands, all that. It's not the retail frenzy anymore, but it's a sustained collector base that actually understands what they're holding. Siu himself is down about 80% on his personal NFT portfolio but he's not sweating it because these were never flip trades for him.

The whole nft dead narrative got amplified when NFT Paris got canceled, but that's actually more about France's political stance on crypto than anything else. The country basically turned against the entire sector. Plus there were some serious security concerns - kidnappings and abduction attempts of crypto people in France made a lot of folks, including Siu, want to avoid the region.

What's wild is that nft dead keeps being the headline, but the data tells a different story. Blockchain is transparent, so you can actually see what's happening on-chain. Wealthy collectors haven't abandoned the space - they've just gotten more selective. It's less about FOMO trading and more about genuine digital art appreciation.

So is nft dead? Not really. It's just evolved into something smaller, more curated, and honestly more sustainable than the 2021 casino vibes. The collectors who actually get it are still here.