2026 NFTs & Gaming Outlook

The NFT market entered 2025 already in a downtrend and never managed to reverse course. Across chains, trading activity shrank and concentrated into a small set of IPs and incentive programs, while most collections and verticals saw little organic interest. This consolidation is starkly reflected in the data, where total annualized NFT trade volume for 2025 stood at $5.5 billion, a sum that significantly trails 2024 levels, underscoring just how far the sector has declined from its peak.

A Narrower, More Concentrated NFT Market

Ethereum solidified its position as the primary venue for what activity remained. Approximately 45% of NFT volume in 2025 took place on the Ethereum mainnet. Bitcoin and Solana, which briefly captured attention during the 2023–24 Ordinals and SOL NFT cycles, lost ground, with Bitcoin’s share of NFT trade volume falling to about 16%, less than half of the prior year, while Solana’s share fell to single-digits.

Source: The Block

The takeaway from this section is straightforward: NFT trading became smaller and more Ethereum-centric. Liquidity thinned out, secondary trading in most collections slowed, and chains that had previously benefited from narrative tailwinds struggled to retain mindshare.

Platform & Product Shifts

Though aggregate volumes declined, 2025 was not static on the product side. Marketplaces and creators experimented with new primitives and business models, in many cases moving away from NFTs as the sole onchain object.

Zora’s Pivot to “Coins”

One of the clearest examples of this shift came from Zora. Early in the year, Zora began deprecating NFT minting and comment features in its app and, in late February 2025, introduced a “Coins” upgrade. With this change, each new post on Zora is minted as its own ERC-20 “coin” with a fixed 1 billion supply, rather than a traditional NFT.

This pivot effectively turned creator posts into lightweight, fungible micro-tokens rather than unique collectibles. The change can be read as an explicit bet that users prefer liquid, low-friction instruments, which can be accumulated, traded and used in incentive schemes over illiquid, one-off NFTs whose value often depends on thin secondary markets.

Marketplaces as “All-In-One” Platforms

Zora was not alone in broadening its scope. Major NFT marketplaces, most notably OpenSea and Magic Eden, continued to position themselves as multi-asset platforms rather than pure NFT listing sites. Both pushed deeper into token swap functionality and more general-purpose trading features alongside their core marketplace businesses, reflecting where liquidity and user interest have migrated.

OpenSea Reclaims Top Market Share

In the case of OpenSea, nowhere was the changing marketplace landscape clearer than in the Ethereum NFT market share rotation. Roughly three years after losing the top spot to Blur, OpenSea regained the lead in 2025 and widened that gap materially over the course of the year.

At the start of 2025, OpenSea’s share of Ethereum/EVM NFT marketplace volume stood at around 36%, against Blur’s 58% share. By late 2025, OpenSea had climbed to over 67%, while Blur’s share dropped to below 24% as total NFT volume conducted on OpenSea achieved double-digit year-on-year (YoY) growth, exceeding $1.4 billion, even as sector-wide volumes fell. Blur’s volumes for the year moved in the opposite direction, declining by over 73%.

Source: The Block

Notable Events

Against the backdrop of declining aggregate activity, only a handful of developments meaningfully shaped the NFT narrative in 2025. Most revolved around the distribution of tokens tied to NFT IP or experiments in verticals with clear, tangible utility.

Magic Eden Token 

Magic Eden’s token launch and incentive programs were among the year’s main catalysts on the marketplace side. The sequence unfolded in three beats. The ME token airdrop in December 2024, the expansion of its staking and trading mechanics in April, and the announcement of a retroactive rewards program in August.

Despite these milestones, Magic Eden’s marketplace volumes remained on a downward trajectory for much of the year, managing to generate bursts of engagement but failing to fully offset the broader decline in NFT demand. This underscores a central theme of 2025,: while incentive programs may direct existing liquidity, they struggle to conjure it in a shrinking market.

NFT IPs Launching Liquid Tokens

A second major thread was the move by prominent NFT collections to issue fungible “ecosystem tokens” as a way to create liquid exposure to their brands. The most visible examples were:

• Pudgy Penguins – PENGU
  
  
• Doodles – DOOD
  
  
• Azuki – ANIME

These launches shared a common goal of transforming static NFT collections with limited trading into broader token ecosystems that supporters could trade, stake, or use in future products. Their price paths, however, underline how difficult it was in 2025 to sustain enthusiasm for culture-linked tokens.

PENGU launched in late 2024 and entered the new year strong. In the first week of the year, it was up nearly 40% in price, before declining by more than 90% over the next three months. It then staged an impressive rebound in Q2, tenfolding its valuation over a three-month period, only to bleed lower again through the back half of the year. At the time of writing, PENGU is down more than 60% year-to-date (YTD).

This kind of pattern is consistent with a launch that initially benefitted from airdrop-driven speculation and narrative momentum, particularly given Pudgy’s strong brand recognition and off-chain presence, but struggled with:

• Limited organic demand once early incentives were exhausted,
  
  
• A lack of clear token sinks or utility beyond trading and potential future rewards, and
  
  
• A challenging macro backdrop for risk assets and “culture coins” in general.

DOOD, the Doodles ecosystem token, followed a similar script but with its own timing. After launch, DOOD fell by nearly 75% within less than two months, then entered a consolidation phase, and later rallied approximately 160% in September–October 2025. That rebound proved transient, as by late 2025, DOOD is down almost 50% YTD.

ANIME, Azuki’s token, stands out mainly for how little relief it experienced. Launched in late January 2025, ANIME declined soon after listing and, unlike PENGU or DOOD, never saw a meaningful bullish period. Instead, it drifted lower throughout the year and currently sits down more than 90% YTD, making it the weakest of the three major NFT ecosystem tokens, as broad fatigue toward “culture coins” appears to have outweighed any initial curiosity.

Source: The Block, CoinGecko

Across the three tokens, their aggregated YTD return is around –67%, which places it alongside the memecoin and gaming GMCI sector indices, shown earlier in chapter 1 of this report, as the worst-performing segments of the market.

The takeaway is not that the concept of ecosystem tokens is fatally flawed, but that 2025 offered little structural demand for culture-driven coins. In an environment where liquidity was scarce and investors increasingly prioritised clear cash-flow or protocol utility, tokens whose value rested primarily on brand affinity struggled to maintain traction. Without strong sinks, revenue-sharing or governance rights, these assets are often traded more like levered call options on short-lived narratives than long-term proxies for IP value.

Pudgy Penguins: Tapping into the Mainstream

If 2025 was defined by a small number of NFT collections that continued to build despite a weak market, Pudgy Penguins sits near the top of that list. From a brand and distribution perspective, the project had one of the busiest years in the sector:

• The team launched Abstract, a dedicated blockchain built on a Layer-2 stack, on mainnet in January 2025.
  
  
• Walmart and Target continued stocking Pudgy toys and merchandise, extending a retail footprint that now reaches a broad non-crypto audience.
  
  
• A Pudgy-branded animated series rolled out on YouTube, further cementing the IP’s presence in digital media.
  
  
• The brand gained sports visibility via a NASCAR Darlington livery in August.
  
  
• Pudgy appeared as a large plush doll in Season 2 of the Apple TV series “Platonic” and teased a collaboration with DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda IP in November.

These developments are proof that NFT IP can meaningfully penetrate mainstream culture, even when on-chain metrics look weak. However, despite the steady stream of positive IP developments, the Pudgy Penguins NFT floor price is down roughly 75% YTD.

Source: The Block

Meanwhile, PENGU, the associated ecosystem token, has also underperformed, sitting around -60% YTD, but still faring somewhat better than the NFTs themselves. This suggests that for investors seeking exposure to the Pudgy brand, the token may have become the more practical and liquid proxy, even if its economics are not directly tied to cash flows from merchandising or media.

The Pudgy case underlines a wider structural issue for NFT projects and IPs. Bullish developments for an IP do not automatically accrue to its NFTs or tokens. Mass-market consumers engaging with toys, shows and collaborations may never touch the blockchain primitives that originally bootstrapped the brand.

Hyperliquid’s Hypurr

While many NFT projects moved toward fungible tokens, some token-native communities experimented in the opposite direction by issuing NFTs as status and engagement layers on top of existing ecosystems, with Hyperliquid’s Hypurr NFT being a leading example.

Hypurr was distributed to Hyperliquid community members under eligibility rules that rewarded active participation on the exchange prior to its TGE back in November 2024. On secondary markets, it debuted with a floor price of more than $55K, with an all-time high of about $79K, before gradually retracing to a floor around $28K.

Source: The Block

The early strength can be attributed to a combination of a highly engaged trader base with strong loyalty to the platform, the status-signaling value of owning a scarce NFT linked to a successful exchange, and expectations of future utility (e.g., access, rewards, or governance).

As weeks passed and concrete utility remained limited, prices drifted lower, reflecting profit-taking and the reality that not all collectors are willing to treat high-priced NFTs as long-term illiquid badges.

Hypurr demonstrates that tokens to NFTs are still a viable direction when built on top of an existing community with demonstrated product-market fit. But it also highlights the importance of clearly defined roles for these NFTs, whether as access passes, loyalty instruments, or collectible trophies, if they are to sustain value beyond initial enthusiasm.

CryptoPunks’ Brief Rally

Even in a quiet year, CryptoPunks managed to generate a short burst of attention. The collection’s floor price rose by roughly 40% between July and August 2025, to a peak of around 54 ETH in mid-July. However, since that local high, the floor has nearly halved, sitting near 30 ETH at the time of writing.

Source: The Block

What makes this episode notable is not only the magnitude of the move but its relationship to ETH. From the beginning of 2025 to just before the July run-up, the correlation coefficient between the Punks floor price and ETH was around –0.28, indicating a weak, slightly inverse relationship.

During the three-week rally itself, the correlation coefficient rose only modestly to 0.24, still a weak link and consistent with an idiosyncratic, likely whale-led squeeze rather than a broad risk-on move. The notable shift came after the peak.

From the local top onward, the correlation with ETH climbed to 0.87, meaning Punks effectively reverted to trading as a high-beta proxy to ETH, typical of post-blow-off behaviour where once collection-specific catalysts fade, market participants return to treating the asset as another levered way to express a view on the underlying chain, rather than as an entirely separate trade.

Pokémon TCG & Gacha Verticals

While most NFT art and PFP collections struggled in 2025, one area that demonstrated clear product-market fit and monetization was the ecosystem around Pokémon trading cards. A cluster of marketplaces, notably Collector Crypt and Courtyard, leveraged crypto rails to facilitate trading, ownership,and gamified “gacha” mechanics for physical and digital Pokémon cards.

Market Structure

On an annualized basis, trading volume across Pokémon TCG marketplaces surpassed the $1 billion mark in 2025, with more than half coming from Courtyard and 1/3rd from Collector Crypt. 

Courtyard maintained relatively stable activity over most of the year, averaging $11 million in trading per week. On the other hand, Collector Crypt followed a more dynamic path where its weekly volumes grew steadily throughout H1 before inflecting sharply after the public sale of its CARDS token on Solana in August.

During the first seven months of 2025, prior to the CARDS public sale, Collector Crypt facilitated roughly $100 million in total volume, averaging $3.3 million per week. In the four months since, total volumes more than doubled while average weekly volumes quadrupled, reflecting a virtuous loop between token incentives, platform liquidity and user engagement.

Source: The Block, Dune (@zkayape)

The CARDS token itself launched at a valuation of $67 million, briefly peaking above $760 million, and later retracted to around $110 million, all within roughly two and a half months. While the token’s own trajectory mirrors broader risk-asset volatility, it clearly played a catalytic role in accelerating platform usage.

Source: The Block, Dune (@zkayape)

On the revenue side, these marketplaces generated an annualized total of ~$107 million in 2025, with approximately 68% of that from Courtyard and 22% from Collector Crypt. The combination of recurring trading fees, premium services and buyback mechanisms gives this vertical a more tangible revenue base than many purely speculative NFT projects.

Gacha Mechanics

A key driver of engagement was the gacha spin mechanic, effectively a crypto-enabled loot box for sealed Pokémon products or curated card drops, with users spending an annualized ~$571 million on gacha spins throughout the year.

Source: The Block, Dune (@zkayape)

Gacha works by allowing users to pay a fixed amount for a randomized chance at high-value cards or sealed products. From an economic perspective, it combines the thrill of randomness familiar from physical card packs, transparent odds and settlement enforced by on-chain mechanics and the ability to immediately trade or consign wins on the same platforms.

These features make it relatively straightforward to model expected value and arbitrage opportunities while still tapping into the emotional appeal of collecting. High spending persists because the mechanic caters to both collectors who value the cards themselves and speculators who are willing to pay for the optionality embedded in each spin.

The data shows that more than half of economic activity on these platforms is tied to gacha, underscoring how powerful a well-designed, game-like mechanic can be when combined with a beloved IP and deep-rooted card culture.

Positioning as a Specialized Sub-Vertical

Relative to the broader NFT market, Pokémon TCG marketplaces operate as a specialized, higher-trust sub-vertical with clearer monetization. Their business models are anchored in:

• Verifiable custody and trading of valuable physical/digital cards,
  
  
• Recurring fee revenue from both secondary trading and gacha spins, and
  
  
• Buyback and reward programs that recycle a portion of earnings into inventory or community rewards.

In a year when many generalist NFT platforms saw volumes and fees compress, this vertical stands out as one of the few areas where user behaviour, revenue and token incentives are tightly aligned. It remains niche relative to total crypto volumes, but it provides a compelling template for how NFTs and tokens can underwrite real economic activity tied to fandom and collectibles rather than purely speculative hype.

NFT/GameFi’s “Funding Vs. Realized Value” Discrepancy

The intersection of NFTs and gaming has been a major investment theme since the Axie Infinity boom, but 2025 data suggests that the sector has failed to justify the scale of capital deployed.

Venture investors have continued to fund NFT and GameFi projects, albeit at a slower pace compared to prior years, with the sector attracting just $1 billion in annualized capital, a roughly 65% decline from 2024 levels. Meanwhile, the aggregate market cap of NFT/gaming tokens is down over 60% YTD, reflecting both price declines and the underperformance of many launched titles.

Source: The Block

Moreover, the current aggregated market cap of NFT/gaming tokens stands at ~$14 billion, which is lower than the cumulative historical funding into the sector of ~$19 billion. In other words, on a mark-to-market basis, investors could, in theory, buy the entire liquid token exposure to the sector for less than the total amount of venture capital that has been allocated to it over the years. This disconnect between capital raised and realised token value reflects a string of projects that attracted substantial funding but struggled to achieve durable adoption.

NFT and Gaming Outlook for 2026

Looking ahead to 2026, the data from 2025 points toward a K-shaped curve for the industry of NFTs, NFT-adjacent IPs and tokens, where a small subset continues to build audiences and occasional liquidity spikes, while the long tail of collections and ecosystems drift lower in both attention and price.

In the base case, NFT trading volumes remain moderate, with activity concentrated in the “upper leg” of that K-shape with projects such as Pudgy Penguins, CryptoPunks and specialised ecosystems such as Pokémon TCG, where they may see enough user engagement, off-chain distribution, or clear monetization to justify ongoing infrastructure and marketplace support. The “lower leg” consists of the majority of 2021–24 vintage collections, where volumes remain thin, floors grind down and token experiments have little impact beyond short-lived rallies.

One of the central lessons of 2025 is that bullish IP does not automatically translate into appreciation for associated NFTs or tokens. The ownership primitives that launched these brands are only one layer of the stack, and they increasingly coexist with mass-market channels such as retail shelves, streaming platforms and social media, that may drive most of the audience and revenue.

For investors and builders, the most prudent stance is therefore highly selective optimism. The sector is smaller, more concentrated and more demanding than ever before. But within that narrower field, projects that can align on-chain assets with real products, revenues and communities may still find room to grow, even if the days of broad, indiscriminate NFT rallies are behind us.

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