This week’s featured collector is Desultor
Desultor is “a dark pixel analog cryptoartist and degen nft collector.” They use their Lazy profile to display the many NFTs they have collected. Check it out at lazy.com/drzadszo
Last week’s poll was almost weirdly balanced, which honestly feels fitting for the Magic Eden moment: anxious, resigned, and angry all tied at 25%, while pragmatic and surprised trailed at 13% each. That split says the news didn’t land as one clean narrative—it landed as a mood cocktail. Some of you felt the immediate operational stress (“I need to move stuff”), some saw it as inevitable bear-market behavior, and some read it as another betrayal of NFT culture by infrastructure players chasing survival. The lower “surprised” vote is telling too: most people weren’t shocked, just disappointed in different flavors. That’s probably where the market is right now—not confused, just emotionally exhausted and increasingly fluent in what consolidation looks like.
What the Data Actually Says About the NFT Boom
One of the most useful questions anyone can ask about the NFT boom is also one of the simplest: what did investors actually make? Not what Beeple sold for. Not what the floor price screenshot said at the top. Not what the repeat-sales chart looked like on Crypto Twitter. What did real people, buying and selling real NFTs, actually earn?
A new VoxEU column by William Goetzmann, Dong Huang, and Milad Nozari argues that the answer is much messier—and much less flattering—than the headline numbers ever suggested. Their core point is that the NFT bubble didn’t just produce extreme returns. It also produced a statistical illusion. The returns people saw were not the same as the returns people got.
The mechanism behind that illusion is something finance people already know well: the disposition effect. Investors tend to sell winners and hold losers. That matters a lot in markets where assets are unique and don’t trade often. If only the “good” assets come back to market, then the transaction record starts telling a distorted story. The market appears healthier, more profitable, and more resilient than it really is—because the losers are sitting silently in wallets, unsold and therefore mostly invisible.
That’s what makes this paper so interesting for NFT collectors. Using blockchain data from SuperRare and OpenSea, the authors argue that the NFT market’s apparent rise was inflated by exactly this effect. On SuperRare, the raw repeat-sales numbers looked absurd: the index peaked in October 2021 at roughly 490 times its initial level. The median realized return on resold NFTs was reportedly 170% in dollar terms. If you stop there, the NFT boom looks like one of the greatest investment opportunities in modern financial history.
But that’s the trap. Only 6.2% of SuperRare NFTs ever resold. That means the headline returns were based on a tiny subset of assets—specifically, the ones whose owners had a reason to sell. The rest, including plenty of probable losers, stayed off the board. In other words, the market’s transaction history didn’t show a full picture of investor outcomes. It showed the winners who made it to the exit.
Once the researchers correct for that selection bias, the story changes a lot. Their selection-corrected index peaks at about one-tenth the level of the unadjusted one, and—crucially—it peaks in March 2021, not October. That means the disposition effect didn’t just inflate the boom; it also delayed the apparent timing of the crash by seven months. The market looked alive longer than it really was because people were reluctant to realize losses.
That point feels bigger than NFTs. It speaks to how entire speculative cultures can remain emotionally bullish even after the turn has already happened. If the losses aren’t being realized, and the only public signals are a handful of winners still trading, people can keep believing the party is going for much longer than it actually is.
What’s striking is that even after the correction, the bubble still looks enormous. The authors say the corrected index still implies a peak increase of around 60 times. So this isn’t a paper saying “nothing happened here.” Quite the opposite. The NFT bubble was still extraordinary. It just wasn’t nearly as broad-based—or as democratically profitable—as it appeared.
The section on who actually made money is probably the most sobering. The researchers identify 199 active intermediaries on SuperRare—basically, serious buyers who bought more than 30 NFTs. Their mean return was 94%, which sounds great until you see the rest: the median was negative 85% when unsold inventory is valued at zero, and nearly two-thirds lost money. The average was dragged upward by a tiny number of spectacular winners.
The same pattern shows up in their simulated “best-case” strategy. They modeled a disciplined approach: buy from the most actively traded artists, keep prices under $10,000, stay systematic. That strategy generated an impressive 14% monthly return—until they removed just the top 0.6% of trades. Take out those few outliers, and the profits disappear. That’s an incredible finding. It suggests that NFT investing during the boom was less like good portfolio construction and more like buying lottery tickets.
Their diversification finding is brutal too: to have a 90% probability of earning a positive return, an investor needed a portfolio of at least 400 NFTs. Most active participants held nowhere near that many. So even the usual advice—diversify—didn’t rescue the average collector. The return structure was simply too skewed.
Then there’s the OpenSea side of the paper, where the authors estimate that about 5% of transactions showed signs of wash trading. That number matters because it reminds us that volume wasn’t always volume, liquidity wasn’t always liquidity, and market signals were often noisier than they looked. In a market already distorted by the disposition effect, fake activity only makes price discovery worse.
The slightly positive read here is that this kind of analysis is only possible because NFTs live on transparent rails. In traditional art markets, housing, or private equity, researchers can only dream of this level of detail. Blockchain lets people study every listing, transfer, bid, and sale. That doesn’t make the market cleaner, but it does make it more legible. And that matters if NFTs are ever going to mature beyond vibes, screenshots, and mythology.
For collectors, the takeaway isn’t that NFTs were fake or that digital art doesn’t matter. It’s that market history and collector history are not the same thing. The boom created real cultural artifacts, real communities, and real artists. But as an investment story, it was far narrower than it looked. A tiny number of extreme winners did almost all the work. Everyone else mostly held bags, held hope, or held still.
That’s useful to know. Because if NFTs are going to have a meaningful next chapter, it probably won’t be built on the fantasy that everyone makes money. It’ll be built on a cleaner understanding of what this market actually was: a speculative bubble, yes—but also a very public experiment in how culture, liquidity, and illusion interact when everything is onchain.
Read the full report at VoxEU.
Poll: What’s your biggest takeaway from this new NFT returns research?
We ❤️ Feedback
We would love to hear from you as we continue to build out new features for Lazy! Love the site? Have an idea on how we can improve it? Drop us a line at info@lazy.com