Marking the 2022 NFT thesis to market

The smartest NFT essay of 2022 promised tickets and diplomas. The market shipped plushies.

Shiv Sakhuja’s “The Future of NFTs” made the honest case back then. NFTs are certificates of ownership, so anything unique with an owner should end up on-chain. Tickets. Degrees. Identity. Real estate. Game items. A whole matrix of serious infrastructure, waiting on the slope of enlightenment.

Four years later, here is the mark to market.

Your ticket is still on Ticketmaster. Your diploma is still not in your wallet. The deed to your house has never met a blockchain. Almost none of the infrastructure matrix shipped at consumer scale.

What shipped was the thing the essay barely priced in: characters.

Pudgy Penguins sold for $2.5M in 2022. It now waddles through Walmart, and Pax and Polly plushies sit in more than 1,800 Target stores. Two of the largest retail chains in America, not a Discord.

Claynosaurz handed holders 15% in options of the operating company. A JPEG collection turned into a cap table.

Chimpers crossed a million followers on both TikTok and Instagram, and has kept climbing since.

Meanwhile CryptoPunks, the bluest chip this market has, closed 2025 around 47.5 ETH. Peak-cycle floor was triple digits.

The essay wasn’t wrong about the technology. Ownership rails, soul-bound credentials, royalties. The principle held. It just moved to the basement. Quiet backend for stablecoins and tokenized funds, not a product anyone wakes up wanting.

The collections that survived don’t certify anything. They sell a character your kid recognizes on a shelf.

I held through the whole repricing. The certificates were never the product. The characters were.