Nfts After The Hype: Ip, Utility And The Fight To Stay Relevant

What Happened

A small group of collections has moved beyond crypto-native speculation and into consumer-facing brands. Pudgy Penguins has continued to present itself as a broader IP business, with recent CoinDesk Research describing more than $13 million in retail sales and over 2 million units sold, while Doodles now frames itself less as a pure collection and more as a creative platform built around content, AI, and brand expansion.

Indeed, the NFT sector has become more selective, with utility-led and gaming-linked activity holding up better than the broad speculative frenzy that defined the earlier cycle.

While a handful of projects are trying to build durable intellectual property, the long tail of profile-picture collections continues to fade.

Market Context

BeInCrypto asked three industry experts how the NFT market is restructuring, and what will determine which projects survive.

The divide now sits at the center of the NFT market’s recovery: whether value can be sustained through real-world brand equity, or whether it still depends on on-chain scarcity.

As market sentiment around scarcity weakened, projects began searching for alternative narratives, from media expansion to merchandise, but often without a clear product-market fit.

“As a result, many of these brands are now stuck trying to pivot from on-chain scarcity toward real-world positioning without having a product-market fit.”

Fernando Lillo Aranda, Marketing Director at Zoomex, takes the opposite view. For him, the market has already moved past scarcity as a primary driver of value.

“The market learned the hard way that being ‘on-chain’ doesn’t make something valuable – it just makes it verifiable. And verification without demand is irrelevant.”

Why It Matters

Brand Equity vs. On-Chain Scarcity

Federico Variola, CEO of Phemex, is skeptical that most projects can successfully make that transition.

Details

“There are still some difficulties in tying the value of NFTs to brand equity in the physical world when there isn’t a clear revenue or distribution funnel.”

In his view, the core issue is that many NFT brands have yet to prove they generate meaningful business outcomes outside of crypto.

“Because of that, I think the real value of NFTs has always been rooted in on-chain scarcity.”

That helps explain why a large share of collections remain significantly below their peak valuations.

“Most NFTs won’t recover – and they probably shouldn’t. Scarcity alone was never a sustainable value proposition.”

He argues that verification on-chain does not create demand on its own.

Instead, he sees the surviving projects as those building real businesses around their IP.

“The only NFTs that have a real future are the ones evolving into actual businesses and IP engines.”

“If your project can’t live outside of crypto, in retail, media, gaming, or culture, then it’s not an asset, it’s a speculation artifact from the last cycle.”

The disagreement relates to execution. The move toward IP-driven value is already underway.

The open question is how many NFT projects can operate as real businesses rather than speculative assets.

Gaming’s Reset: From Play-to-Earn to Play-to-Own

The failure of early NFT gaming models made the speculation versus sustainability debate impossible to ignore.