Created by Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann, it went to Vignesh Sundaresan, a Singapore-based crypto investor, for $69.3 million.

The hype around NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, peaked with nearly $2.8 billion in monthly trading volume in August 2021 alone.

Last week, the crypto-gambling website DappGambl researched the current market value of this revolutionary art form and found that of the 73,257 NFT collections they could find, 69,795 of them have a market cap of zero. That’s nada. Zip. A big nothing. They are apparently worthless.

And while there are no doubt many high-minded individuals who genuinely thought that a digital picture of a monkey marked a whole new economy, this has the hallmark of one of the best swindles of all time. 

Everydays wasn’t even the most expensive NFT sold that year. Merge, by the digital artist Pak, went for $91.8 million in December. Nor is the $2.8 billion trading volume of the market’s peak to be sniffed at. It is 

• the amount Estee Lauder paid for Tom Ford in 2022; 
• Japan’s latest long-range missile budget; and 
• the economic hit Ebola caused to the economies of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone in 2014. 

It is, by anyone’s measure, a tidy piece of change. And that was just one month.

Not all NFTs are worthless. A Bumblebee token purchased by YouTuber Logan Paul for $623,000 in January 2022 at least retains some value. It’s worth $10. 

This would be more amusing if no-one was hurt – but NFTs are an enormous energy sink. Which is why it’s worth stepping back a little, since part of the problem is that most people don’t know much about NFTs beyond the fact that they live on the blockchain.

Here’s a thought experiment to explain the blockchain. Imagine every computer in the world had, buried in its guts, an old-fashioned paper accounts book; money in, money out.

Then imagine every time a bitcoin or any other piece of cryptocurrency changed hands, an actual pen appeared and wrote down what had happened. Donald sells an NFT to Ron. You’d struggle to erase that pen in one computer, let alone every computer in the world. In effect, Ron will always have proof he bought the NFT. And that’s pretty much it. Except for the electricity involved in running all the computers and all the servers across the planet.

The energy required to mint and move the NFT collections examined by DappGambl was roughly 27,789,258 kWh, emitting approximately 16,243 metric tons of CO2 – the annual emissions of over 2,000 houses.

Those NFTs are now seemingly valueless. And while there are no doubt many high-minded individuals who genuinely thought that a digital picture of a monkey marked a whole new economy, this has all the hallmarks of a con.

In 1940, the linguistics professor David Maurer published The Big Con, his guide to the slang of the 1920s confidence trickster. It became The Sting. Players of The Big Con looked for smart-ish people with money they hadn’t quite earned who wanted more, and offered them an inside edge.

The players isolated their targets, persuaded them there was easy money with a deal suckers couldn’t have, made them think they’d missed the boat then took them for a lot but not everything. If the con was successful they’d come back for more.

While Everydays and Merge were sold to people of financial sophistication who may have had their eyes wide open, NFTs satisfy every one of these stages – middle-class people in or just out of lockdown with the wages they earned while costs were low had spent so much time online that they thought they were digital natives on the inside of the future while everyone else was making money.

As with all big cons, the grifters melt away and the mark is left holding plenty of nothing. There is a planet full of people who don’t understand the blockchain but think it means money. They’re not even sure what fungible means. These are the marks. They will be hit again.