The NFT market’s collapse from its 2021 peak was faster and more complete than almost any comparable speculative episode in recent memory. Trading volumes that had reached billions of dollars monthly fell by more than ninety-five percent. Projects that had sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars became effectively worthless. The journalists who had written breathless profiles of digital artists selling JPEGs for millions wrote equally breathless obituaries two years later. Both sets of articles were, in different ways, missing the point.