Same. I'm getting to the age where I say "I don't get it" when it comes to a lot of popular things these days. I said it loudly about NFTs, glad to see I didn't misunderstand it.
Someone mentioned in a video about crypto that the boom in nfts coincided with new tax rules for art that made it harder for millionaires to store/hide their money in it and avoid tax.
And yet crypto is back up again for some dumb reason. Are we sure NFTs are truly dead or are we going to see that grift in a new form soon? One can only hope it's the former.
NFT as ape pics are dead, yes. But crypto as a form of value exchange for transactions where you don't want too many eyes looking at it has not stopped since its invention in 2008. It's just going to become a normal staple of the internet, like Bittorrent and VPNs, just existing and being used without anybody really caring too much about the technology itself. I still use it to pay for some online services where I basically just want to hand them the internet equivalent of a wad of cash without giving anyone any account details of any kind. I've been doing that since 2013, the NFT thing just kinda came and went and I didn't care too much about it.
Keep in mind that buying photos isn't the only application of NFTs. People stopped buying valueless photos, but other implementations of NFTs kept on being used.
Right… the technology conceivably has value as a way to digitally trade ownership and track authenticity. It just happens that it was used for a bunch of truly worthless algorithmically generated art that people got suckered into by hype.
NFTs came about due to collectable communities trying to capitalize off cryptocurrency (think baseball cards, shoes, Funko Pops, etc). NFTs were doomed from their inception because they attempt to give limitless data artificial scarcity.