This week’s featured collector is highmtnventures
Highmtnventures has a dynamic collection of artworks. Lots of beautiful pieces. Worth checking out at lazy.com/Highmtnventures
Last week’s poll made the “reset market” vibe feel very real: the audience split cleanly between collecting artists you believe in (40%) and curation + discovery (40%), which is basically saying the same thing from two angles—conviction and signal. Only 20% chose sitting tight, and the most surprising result was the double zero: 0% for both infrastructure + permanence and liquidity + market structure. Translation: people are trying to figure out what’s actually good and who’s worth backing while everything’s quiet. That’s a collector mindset, not a trader mindset.
Gary Vee: NFTs Are Done Being Loud
NFTs are done being loud.
That’s the subtext that jumped out of this Gary Vee interview—tucked between Super Bowl chatter, agency flexes, and the usual “what’s next” talk. Someone asks him the question everyone asks now: aren’t NFTs dead? And instead of trying to re-light the hype, he does something more useful: he reframes NFTs as digital collectibles going through a long, boring, very normal cultural cycle.
Gary’s core claim is simple: most people think the whole thing was a fad, but the category is still active. He points to continued spending—tens of millions of dollars in recent buying—as proof that interest hasn’t vanished, it’s just not dominating mainstream attention. That distinction matters. The early NFT era trained people to equate “real” with “trending.” But collecting has never worked that way. The most durable collector markets often look quiet from the outside: they’re driven by a smaller group of committed buyers making repeat decisions over time.
His analogy is telling: he compares NFTs to contemporary art’s boom-and-bust arc—the moment where everything gets hot, then collapses, then a handful of artists and works slowly consolidate into cultural permanence. You don’t have to buy the specifics of his art history comparison to understand the shape. When a new medium arrives, the first wave is chaotic: speculation mixes with genuine innovation, copycats flood in, prices detach from taste, and the whole thing becomes easy to dismiss. Then the market sobers up. The work either holds up or it doesn’t.
Collectors will recognize the brutal honesty in the line Gary repeats: “99% are going to zero.” That’s not a bearish take; it’s a collector’s take. In every collectible category—cards, comics, sneakers, art—most items aren’t meant to be culturally preserved. Most are just… items. Scarcity alone doesn’t create meaning. Meaning plus time does. The NFT era just compressed that lesson into a few short years and made it tradable in real time.
The other interesting move he makes is to place NFTs inside a broader “collectibles are exploding” context. When he mentions trading cards and auction activity, he’s really saying: the behavior—people collecting objects of identity, nostalgia, and status—hasn’t gone away. It’s shifting channels. Some collectors buy cardboard. Some buy digital objects with provenance. Some buy both. The current moment looks less like a death and more like a recalibration—a return to fundamentals after the market’s attention economy overheated.
This is where his VeeFriends comments are actually more revealing than they sound. He doesn’t pitch it as a quick comeback story. He frames it like a long play: building daily, staying disciplined, and hoping that years from now it’s one of the small number of projects that “made it out of the era” as a meaningful collectible. That’s the mindset shift a lot of the space still needs. Not “when will floors pump again?” but “what will still matter in 5–10 years?”
There’s also a subtle point in how he talks about journalism and interviews. He says he values being asked questions that take him down paths he wouldn’t choose alone. That’s relevant because NFTs need more of exactly that right now: fewer slogans, more interrogation. The post-hype phase is when weak narratives collapse and strong ones deepen. The medium gets better when it has to defend itself without euphoria doing the work.
And oddly, the last part of the interview—about his desire to buy nostalgic brands and refurbish them—loops back to NFTs in an unexpected way. He’s obsessed with the pattern: something gets hot, becomes uncool, then returns in a new form when the context changes. That’s basically the same arc he’s describing for NFTs. Not a straight line. A cycle. A cultural metabolism.
So what’s the takeaway for NFT collectors and creators reading this?
If you’re collecting: this is the phase where taste matters more than timing. Liquidity is thinner, attention is scattered, and the easy wins are gone—which means what you buy now is more likely to reflect conviction than FOMO. If you’re creating: this is the moment to build work that survives without constant noise. In a loud market, marketing can disguise weak ideas. In a quiet market, the work has to carry itself.
NFTs may never return to 2021’s volume of attention—and honestly, that might be healthy. The more interesting question is whether the medium can mature into something people collect for reasons other than adrenaline. If Gary’s framing is right, we’re not at the end. We’re in the part where the category stops trying to impress everyone and starts proving what it’s actually for.
Watch the full interview.
Poll: Do you agree with Gary Vee’s take on NFTs?
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