NFTs are coming back but Blue Chip projects are on life support
NFT trading volume rose in Q3 2025 and sales counts reached a high.
The center of gravity shifted to cheaper rails and utilitarian use cases as Ethereum’s scaling upgrade pushed activity to L2s, Solana leaned on throughput and compression, and Bitcoin inscriptions matured into a collectibles culture that waxes and wanes with fee markets.
Fees and distribution, not profile pictures, now set the boundary for growth.
Post-Dencun economics reset the map. Ethereum’s EIP-4844 cut data costs for rollups, pushing L2 transaction fees toward cents and enabling gasless or sponsored flows for mainstream-facing mints.
L2 fees fell by more than 90 percent in the wake of the upgrade, a shift already visible in mint behavior and the rise of Base as a distribution rail.
On Solana, compression brought mass issuance into range for loyalty and access use cases, with provisioning costs for 10 million compressed NFTs around 7.7 SOL and median transaction fees near $0.003 even under load.
Bitcoin inscriptions carved out a separate lane tied to mempool cycles and miner revenue, with more than 80 million inscriptions by February 2025 and a top-three position by lifetime NFT sales.
