On NFTs

As you may or may not know, I spent close to three years building a startup around NFTs.

It’s been about two years since I shut it down, and I’ve been thinking about where the space stands today. This isn’t a trend for me. I spent a meaningful part of my life on this, and if I’m being honest, my understanding of NFTs today is very different from what it was when I started.

When we first started exploring NFTs, what excited me wasn’t the art or the hype. It was the concept. At its core, an NFT is a token that represents ownership, governed by a set of rules defined in code. Once it exists, it can’t be altered. Every transaction builds on top of the previous one, but the original record always remains. That made sense.

But early on, we saw problems with how NFTs were being implemented. Dependency on blockchain and crypto, high gas fees, energy concerns, and for enterprise use cases, putting sensitive data on a public system didn’t make sense. So we tried to rethink it. We built our own system on top of an immutable database. Kept what made sense, removed everything else. At the time, it felt like the right direction.

Looking back, that wasn’t the real problem.

The biggest mistake I made was thinking adoption was blocked by technology. It wasn’t. The market didn’t fail because the technology was weak. It failed because the problems being solved were optional. NFTs, in most of their popular forms, were simply not necessary.

At the peak, most of the value came from digital art and collectibles, and honestly, the biggest value they offered was bragging rights. That’s not enough. When the macro environment turned and people had more important things to deal with, they moved on.

That said, I don’t think the artist side of NFTs was meaningless. If anything, some of the artists I met in that phase actually made me appreciate art more than I had before. There was real work, real creativity, and in some cases, real value being created. I would have genuinely liked to see more serious art, even physical art, being explored through NFTs in a more grounded way.

It didn’t matter how good the tech was. If it’s not solving a real problem, people will leave, and they did.

There’s another side to this. The NFT space itself was rigid. When we tried to build NFTs without blockchain, most NFT users didn’t even want to understand it. To them, NFTs had to be on-chain. At the same time, businesses didn’t care about the concept. They didn’t want infrastructure. They wanted finished products that improved their business. So we were stuck in between people who believed in the idea, but only in one way, and people who needed value, but didn’t care about the idea. That gap is real.

A lot of what was happening in the space also became difficult to trust. Multiple analyses have shown that a meaningful portion of NFT trading activity, especially during peak periods, was driven by wash trading. In simple terms, the same entities buying and selling assets across wallets to inflate volume and price signals. When anonymity is high and accountability is low, it becomes easier to create the illusion of demand. That doesn’t mean all activity was fake, but it does mean the signal was often distorted, and once trust starts eroding, the market eventually corrects.

On top of that, the space kept adding layers. Tokens, airdrops, fractional ownership. All interesting ideas, but at some point you have to step back and ask a simple question: what value is actually being created? Adding complexity is easy. Creating something people genuinely need is much harder.

We explored use cases like Digital Product Passports, tracking authenticity, sourcing, and lifecycle of products. In regulated markets, this makes sense because companies are required to share that information whether the end consumer engages with it or not. Regulation forces adoption. In markets like India, that dynamic doesn’t exist. Only a small segment of consumers care deeply about sourcing and traceability, and even among them, engagement is inconsistent. People don’t have the time or the incentive to repeatedly check this kind of information for everyday products.

There is an argument that these systems can create better brand experiences. That may be true, but that value is limited. It applies more naturally to luxury products where differentiation matters. For everyday products, the experience is a nice addition, not a deciding factor, and when your value depends on optional engagement, adoption becomes difficult to sustain.

At one point, I realized something that stayed with me. There was interest. There was willingness to invest. The space had momentum. But when I stripped everything down, one question kept coming back: is this solving something real? And the honest answer, at least for what we had built, was no. It made sense, it was interesting, it could be positioned well, but it wasn’t necessary.

That’s a dangerous place to build from. Funding interest is not proof of product market fit. Capital will follow narratives, especially when the right words are involved, but that doesn’t mean the problem is worth solving. If the value is optional, the market eventually corrects itself.

I don’t think the concept itself is flawed. There’s something fundamentally strong about the idea: permanent, self-enforcing records of ownership and rules. At the same time, it would be incorrect to dismiss blockchain entirely. It solves a real problem. Decentralization, trust without a central authority, and resistance to single points of failure are meaningful advantages. In many cases, decentralization is a feature. In others, it’s unnecessary complexity.

What people call NFTs today are tied to blockchain. The idea itself isn’t. A standard is just an agreed upon system. It exists because people accept it, not because it’s the only way something can be built. That doesn’t mean the idea cannot evolve beyond the current implementation.

What matters is whether the concept is being applied to something that actually needs it, and in my case, I couldn’t find that alignment. The problem wasn’t the technology. It was the absence of a problem that demanded it.

If NFTs are going to work, they have to exist where ownership actually matters, where rules need to be enforced without trust, and where the value is not optional. Gaming, ticketing, real world assets. Maybe. But the bar is high. Just because something can be built this way doesn’t mean it should be.

In hindsight, I would never build another NFT marketplace. That model was built on speculation. If I were to build again, I would start with a simpler question: what problem exists today that cannot be solved without this? Until there’s a clear answer, everything else is just experimentation.

I think the bubble bursting was a good thing. It removed the noise. It forced people to ask harder questions, and maybe that’s where NFTs have a real chance.

Not as a trend. As a tool.