NFT sales rose sharply in the week ending Sept. 26, but the $55.51 million recorded across blockchains remains a fraction of the market’s 2021–2022 scale and was concentrated in a small group of established collections. The rebound, led by Ethereum’s CryptoPunks, coincides with experiments that use NFT structures to package tokenized market exposure and protocol fees, shifting attention from standalone profile-picture speculation toward assets with embedded financial mechanics.
CryptoSlam recorded weekly NFT sales of roughly $55.51 million, a 57.17% increase from the preceding seven days. Ethereum accounted for about $30.33 million of that total, followed by Polygon with $7.44 million and Bitcoin with $5.13 million. During the prior bull-market cycle, daily NFT turnover occasionally reached hundreds of millions of dollars, putting the latest weekly figure in perspective.
CryptoPunks was the leading collection over the period, generating about $8.24 million from 85 transactions, according to CryptoSlam. The sales involved 62 buyer addresses and 55 seller addresses, a narrow participant base for a collection that remains one of the category’s best-known status assets.
A recovery led by a few high-value collections
The latest increase in volume does not point to broad liquidity across the NFT market. High-value collections can produce substantial dollar turnover through a limited number of sales, particularly when their individual NFTs trade for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
That concentration is visible in legacy collections where daily activity remains thin. Bored Ape Yacht Club, once among the most actively traded NFT sets, has at times recorded only a handful of daily transactions. In a Sept. 28 social-media post, Back referenced a Bored Ape purchase made for 500 ETH in January 2022, then valued at about $1.3 million, illustrating the price levels reached during the peak period.
Pudgy Penguins offers another example of the gap that can emerge between an NFT collection, a consumer brand and a related cryptocurrency. The collection’s JPEG floor was around 3.28 ETH in the figures provided, placing the value of the full set at roughly $70 million to $80 million. Its PENGU token traded around $0.009, with a cited circulating market value of about $5.77 million, down roughly 86% from its December 2024 peak.
The brand has developed revenue sources outside NFT trading. Pudgy Penguins toys have been placed in major U.S. retailers including Walmart, Target and Walgreens, with reported cumulative sales above 1 million units and more than $10 million in physical retail revenue. That commercial footprint does not automatically establish value for either the NFTs or token, but it gives the project a distribution channel that many digital collections lack.
Long-term data shows a much smaller market
The market’s longer decline remains stark. BlockchainDose, citing CryptoSlam, reported that NFT trading volume for 2025 stood at about $5.5 billion, down 37% from 2024 and more than 90% below 2021’s peak.
Digital art has contracted even more severely. DappRadar recorded about $2.9 billion in digital-art transaction value during 2021, falling to $197 million in 2024. The category generated about $23.8 million in the first quarter of 2025, according to DappRadar’s data.
That decline has altered the economics of collecting. During the previous cycle, scarcity narratives and rapidly rising floor prices could draw buyers into collections with limited utility beyond community access, aesthetics or resale expectations. Lower turnover now makes it harder for holders to exit positions without discounting prices, especially in collections with large supplies or limited cultural relevance outside crypto-native circles.
A rising floor price in a leading collection can therefore signal renewed demand for that specific asset rather than a return of broad-based NFT trading. The difference matters for traders assessing liquidity: a collection with a handful of expensive sales may look active by dollar volume while remaining difficult to enter or leave at a predictable price.
Financialized NFTs enter the market
Some newer projects are applying NFT ownership models to tokenized financial exposure rather than digital art alone. On Robinhood Chain, projects described as Quotrons, StonkBrokers and RH Machines use NFT-linked accounts, token burns and fee-sharing mechanisms to connect their collectibles to onchain assets associated with U.S. stocks.
Quotrons is described as a 4,444-item ERC-404 series. ERC-404 is an experimental token design that combines features associated with fungible tokens and NFTs. In the project’s model, one token corresponds to one terminal-style NFT, while token burns activate tracks linked to price exposure for assets including Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, GameStop and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust.
StonkBrokers uses 4,444 ERC-6551 NFTs. ERC-6551 allows an NFT to control its own token-bound account, enabling assets to move alongside the NFT when it is transferred. The project’s design assigns stock-related exposure to those accounts and directs certain automated-market-maker fees toward further token purchases after activation.
RH Machines follows a similar approach with 10,000 units and a paired PRINTER token. Burning PRINTER activates a machine-linked account designed to receive stock-related token exposure through protocol fees. The supplied price data showed its floor falling to 0.003 ETH before recovering to around 0.04 ETH, a reminder that financial features do not remove the volatility associated with thinly traded NFT markets.
The stock-linked tokens in these structures are described as providing price exposure rather than direct ownership of listed-company shares or voting rights. That distinction places them closer to derivatives or synthetic instruments than conventional equity holdings, while the NFT serves as a transferable container for the associated onchain account and contract rules.
Derivatives growth creates a new use case
The appeal of these designs reflects rapid growth in onchain real-world-asset derivatives. An a16z crypto analysis estimated that RWA perpetual futures generated $117.3 billion in trading volume during August 2026, about 44 times the year-earlier level. The analysis said roughly $101 billion, or 86%, occurred onchain, compared with about $16 billion on centralized venues.
Open interest in those products reached about $4.8 billion, compared with $161 million in July 2025, according to a16z crypto. Equities represented 48% of the category’s open interest, commodities accounted for 28%, and indexes made up 18%.
That growth gives NFT developers a market to connect with, but it also introduces risks that are absent from a standard art collectible. A tokenized stock-exposure product can depend on oracle pricing, smart-contract security, liquidity in the underlying token, leverage conditions and the mechanics used to issue or redeem the asset. Fee distributions and token burns may reduce supply or redirect revenue, yet they do not guarantee demand, stable returns or immediate exit liquidity.
The strongest evidence from the latest NFT figures is a divided market: blue-chip collections can still draw substantial capital during bursts of activity, while the broader art market remains far smaller than it was at its peak. Projects adding token-bound accounts and market-linked exposure are testing a different proposition—whether an NFT can function less as a scarce image and more as programmable ownership infrastructure.
Curious where NFTs go next? Explore their evolution in this deep-dive NFT market outlook today.
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