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Are 95 Percent of NFTs Worthless? What a 2023 Report Found

A 2023 report assigned zero-ETH market capitalization to about 95% of the NFT collections it analyzed. The figure is historical and collection-level, not a current census of every NFT.
From TheFinanceBase Team3 min to read
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A 2023 report found that 69,795 of 73,257 NFT collections it analyzed had a market capitalization of zero ETH—about 95% of its sample. That is a historical, collection-level result, not proof that 95% of every NFT token is worthless today. The report used zero market capitalization as its measure of “worthless”; that financial proxy does not establish whether a token has artistic, historical, personal, or practical value.

What did the report actually measure?

dappGambl said its analysis used data provided by NFTScan and covered 73,257 identified NFT collections. It assigned zero-ETH market capitalization to 69,795 of them, which works out to about 95% of the collections in that sample. The Guardian’s contemporaneous account also described the report as reviewing NFTScan and CoinMarketCap data. The Guardian’s 2023 report repeated the headline figures and noted an example in which a listed floor price was sharply different from recorded sales.

The unit was the collection, not each individual NFT. A collection-level figure cannot establish that every token in those collections had no possible buyer or value. Nor does it count all NFT collections or tokens in existence.

Does zero market capitalization mean an NFT has no value?

No. It means the report’s market-cap measure was zero ETH; it is not an independent assessment of artistic, historical, utility, legal, or personal value. A market-cap figure can also be hard to interpret when there are few or no transactions and no reliable buyer. A listed floor price is an asking price, not evidence that a buyer completed a sale at that amount.

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It helps to keep four things separate:

  • Token control: who controls the token recorded on the blockchain.
  • Associated media or item: the image, file, game item, or real-world object the token may point to.
  • Rights: any copyright, license, or contractual rights, which are not established merely by owning a token.
  • Resale demand: whether a buyer is willing to pay for it, and at what price.

Ethereum.org explains that “NFTs are tokens that are individually unique” and that ownership of an Ethereum asset is publicly verifiable on the blockchain. That record does not guarantee a sale price, continued access to linked media, or intellectual-property rights.

Is the 95% figure still true today?

The cited result describes the report’s 2023 analysis. The available sources do not provide a new 2026 census, so they cannot establish what share of NFT collections currently has zero market capitalization. Treating the 95% figure as a current market-wide statistic would go beyond what the report measured.

Other research offers context, but does not update or verify the headline figure. A 2022 Scientific Reports study analyzed 3.7 million transactions involving 1.4 million NFTs across 410 collections from January 2018 through June 2022. It investigated how rarity relates to prices and market behavior; its sample and question differ from dappGambl’s collection-level zero-ETH count. Read the study in Scientific Reports.

How strong is the report’s estimate of affected holders?

dappGambl estimated that more than 23 million people held NFTs in collections it characterized as worthless. That is the report’s estimate, not a verified count of people who lost money. A collection-level zero-ETH metric does not by itself establish each holder’s purchase price, ability to sell, or personal financial loss, and the cited pages do not provide a reproducible holder-count calculation method.

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What can readers conclude?

The report is evidence that, in its 2023 dataset, most identified collections were assigned zero-ETH market capitalization under its method. It is not a census of every NFT, a current estimate, or proof that each token in those collections had no value. The result is best read as a warning about resale liquidity and the limits of headline market figures—not as a definitive verdict on every NFT’s worth.

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