The NFT of the first published tweet has lost 99.99% of its value in a year

• Pixel What is an NFT and how does it work?

The entrepreneur Sina Estavi bought in March 2021 the first tweet that was published on Twitter.

, founder of the social network, transformed his iconic message -

- into an NFT (non-fungible token, a kind of digital certificate of authenticity) that he auctioned off for charity .

Estavi paid 1630.6 Ethereum for him, an amount in cryptocurrency that

.

In the midst of the NFT craze, the amount even seemed justified.

That same month the NFT of a digital artwork created by the artist Beeple came up for auction at Christie's for $69 million.

The technology seemed destined to forever transform the world of collecting and art.

Last week Estavi decided to sell that same NFT and donate 50% of the proceeds to the GiveDirectly charity.

He put it up for auction with an initial price of

.

He only received a handful of offers.

Highest bid?

, 0.009% of what it cost a year ago.

It is not clear if Estavi will accept the offer, and he still has two days to decide, but the drop in price somewhat reflects the loss of interest in the NFT phenomenon.

The figure reached by Beeple's digital work unleashed a "gold rush" in 2021 that completely saturated the market.

Now comes the hangover.

The median selling price of an NFT is below $2,000, down from $6,800 in January.

Cumulative daily sales across major NFT markets have fallen from $160 million in January to just $26 million.

A third of NFTs are now worth nothing, according to consultancy Nansen, which has studied the evolution of several NFT collections.

In general, it can be said that half of all the money that these assets moved has evaporated from the market.

Even popular franchises that are still attracting investment, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club (a collection of monkey-shaped digital avatars), are selling well below the prices they reached even earlier this year.

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