Giannis Andreou

NFT Paris, one of Europe’s better-known non-fungible token (NFT) gatherings, was abruptly called off for 2026, alongside its sister event, RWA Paris, roughly a month before it was due to run.
A conference cancellation does not measure the NFT market in the same way a sales chart does, but it can reveal something else: whether there is still enough demand, sponsorship budget and industry momentum to keep large-scale NFT events economically viable.
With NFT trading activity and valuations widely reported to be down from prior peaks, NFT Paris’ decision offers a useful signal of what “the NFT market” looks like heading into 2026.

What exactly got canceled?
NFT Paris and the adjacent RWA Paris event were billed as a Feb. 5–6 gathering at the Grande Halle de la Villette before organizers pulled the plug with roughly a month’s notice.
In the organizers’ statement, the team said the “market collapse hit us hard,” “drastic cost cuts” still were not enough, and all tickets would be refunded within 15 days.
The bigger question is what happened around the event’s funding. Some sponsors said they would not receive refunds, even as the event reiterated its ticket-refund timeline.
Large Web3 conferences typically rely heavily on sponsorships to justify venue, production and programming costs. When that underwriting disappears, it can signal that marketing budgets and the expected returns from NFT-focused visibility have tightened.
Signals from the NFT market heading into 2026
On the money side, aggregated market data has been weak compared to earlier cycles. CryptoSlam’s NFT Global Sales Volume index shows $320.2 million in NFT sales volume for November 2025. That figure is down from $629 million in October 2025. December 2025 was $303.5 million.
CoinMarketCap’s Academy coverage of the same period described November as the weakest month of 2025 and tied the slowdown to broader pressure across digital collectibles.
But activity has not vanished. DappRadar’s reporting on 2025 highlighted a pattern in which sales counts rose even as average prices and headline volumes remained comparatively subdued. In Q3 2025, 18.1 million NFTs were sold, generating $1.6 billion in trading volume. The report also noted that many NFTs were trading at lower values than before.
Taken together, the “state of the NFT market” heading into 2026 looks compressed and price-sensitive: There are plenty of transactions, far less sponsor-friendly hype and liquidity concentrated in fewer places.

Why a conference cancellation can sometimes say more than a price chart
NFT prices can swing for many reasons. These include incentive programs, thin liquidity or a handful of high-ticket sales that do not reflect the wider market. A conference, by contrast, lives or dies on whether the industry is willing to pay to gather, through ticket demand, exhibitor spending and especially sponsorship budgets.
In the event business, sponsorships and expo revenue are often treated as core pillars. The Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA), for example, points to a “healthy” revenue mix in which a meaningful share comes from registration and a similar share comes from expo and sponsorship.
Trade show analysts also note that many events earn most of their revenue from exhibitors rather than ticket sales.
So, when NFT Paris says the “market collapse hit us hard” despite “drastic cost cuts,” it tells us a lot about the economics surrounding NFTs, not only the assets themselves.
Where NFTs still have traction
Even in a down market, NFTs have not disappeared so much as shifted into narrower, utility-led niches.
One example is ticketing and fan access. Ticketmaster has promoted “token-gated” sales, where holding a specific NFT can unlock presales, upgraded seats or packaged experiences. This positions NFTs as access credentials rather than standalone collectibles.
Coachella’s Coachella Keys experiment made the same point. NFTs were sold as lifetime festival access with VIP-style perks, tying ownership to something tangible rather than a resale narrative.
At the same time, several high-profile consumer brands have scaled back or sunset NFT-style loyalty pilots. Starbucks confirmed it would end its Odyssey program on March 31, 2024, framing the move as a step to “prepare for what comes next.”
Reddit has signaled a wind-down of parts of its Collectible Avatars stack, including closing its shop and removing some on-platform functions.
Marketplace consolidation, incentives and the pivot away from “NFT-only”
Another reason a flagship conference can struggle is that the NFT economy it was built around is no longer centered on NFT marketplaces as a standalone category.
OpenSea, for instance, has been publicly repositioning itself beyond its original identity. CEO Devin Finzer has described a shift from being an NFT marketplace toward a broader “trade-everything” model.
At the same time, the trader-led marketplace era, exemplified by Blur, changed how volume is generated. Multiple researchers and analysts have linked parts of the post-2022 NFT volume story to incentive-driven activity, which can boost headline numbers without necessarily reflecting new end-user demand.
Add in regulatory uncertainty around NFTs and major platforms, including the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Wells notice disclosed by OpenSea in 2024, and the result is a market that looks more cautious, more consolidated and less willing to fund large NFT-only moments.
What’s next for NFTs?
NFT Paris cancellation can be seen as a snapshot of the market’s current economics. It does not, on its own, indicate market terminality.
Against a backdrop in which monthly NFT sales volumes were widely reported to be far below prior highs, the event’s failure to pencil out fits a market with less discretionary spending.
Going into 2026, analysts are likely watching three signals:
Whether volumes hold without incentive spikesWhether brands and sponsors return with measurable product goalsWhether NFTs show up as “invisible infrastructure” inside games, ticketing or loyalty.
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BTQ Technologies said it had launched a Bitcoin Quantum testnet on Jan. 12, 2026, a Bitcoin-like network designed to trial post-quantum signatures without touching Bitcoin mainnet governance.
The idea is that BTQ would replace Bitcoin’s current signature scheme with ML-DSA, the module-lattice signature standard formalized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 204, for post-quantum security assumptions.
It is worth remembering that in most Bitcoin quantum-threat models, the key precondition is public-key exposure. If a public key is already visible on-chain, a sufficiently capable future quantum computer could, in theory, attempt to recover the corresponding private key offline.
Did you know? BTQ Technologies is a research-focused firm working on post-quantum cryptography and blockchain security. Its Bitcoin Quantum testnet is designed to study how quantum-resistant signatures behave in a Bitcoin-like system.
What quantum changes?
Most Bitcoin quantum-risk discussions focus on digital signatures, not on Bitcoin’s coin supply or the idea that a quantum computer could magically guess random wallets.
The specific concern is that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) could run Shor’s algorithm to solve the discrete logarithm problem efficiently enough to derive a private key from a known public key, undermining both the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and Schnorr-based signing.
Chaincode Labs frames this as the dominant quantum threat model for Bitcoin because it could enable unauthorized spending by producing valid signatures.
The risk can be separated into long-range exposure, where public keys are already visible onchain for some older script types or due to reuse, and short-range exposure, where public keys are revealed when a transaction is broadcast and awaits confirmation, creating a narrow time window.
Of course, no quantum computer today poses an immediate risk to Bitcoin, and mining-related impacts should be treated as a separate and more constrained discussion compared with signature breakage.
What BTQ built and why it’s interesting
BTQ’s Bitcoin Quantum testnet is essentially a Bitcoin Core-based fork that swaps out one of Bitcoin’s most important primitives, signatures.
In its announcement, BTQ said the testnet replaces ECDSA with ML-DSA, the module-lattice signature scheme standardized by the NIST as FIPS 204 for post-quantum digital signatures.
This change forces a set of engineering trade-offs. ML-DSA signatures are roughly 38–72 times larger than ECDSA, so the testnet raises the block size limit to 64 mebibytes (MiB) to make room for the additional transaction data.
The company also treats the network as a full lifecycle proving ground, supporting wallet creation, transaction signing and verification, and mining, along with basic infrastructure such as a block explorer and mining pool.
In short, the testnet’s practical value is that it turns post-quantum Bitcoin into a performance and coordination experiment.
Where old BTC risk concentrates
When analysts talk about “old BTC risk” in a post-quantum context, they are usually referring to public keys that are already exposed onchain.
A future CRQC capable of running Shor’s algorithm could, in theory, use those public keys to derive the corresponding private keys and then produce valid spends.
There are three output types immediately vulnerable to long-range attacks, specifically because they place elliptic-curve public keys directly in the locking script (ScriptPubKey): Pay-to-Public-Key (P2PK), Pay-to-Multi-Signature (P2MS) and Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR).
The distribution is uneven:
P2PK is a tiny share of today’s unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), around 0.025%, but it locks a disproportionate share of BTC value, about 8.68% or 1,720,747 Bitcoin, mostly dormant Satoshi-era coins.P2MS accounts for about 1.037% of UTXOs, but reports estimate that it secures only around 57 BTC.P2TR is common by count, around 32.5% of UTXOs, yet small by value in the same snapshot, about 0.74% or 146,715 BTC. Its exposure is tied to Taproot’s key-path design, where a tweaked public key is visible on-chain.

BTQ’s own messaging uses this exposed-key framing to argue that the potentially affected pool is large. It cites 6.26 million BTC as exposed, which is part of why the company says testing post-quantum signatures in a Bitcoin-like environment is worth doing now.
What’s next for Bitcoin?
In the near term, the most concrete work is observability and preparedness.
As explored, the signature threat model is driven by public-key exposure. This is why discussions often center on how Bitcoin’s existing wallet and scripting practices either reveal public keys early, as with some legacy script types, or reduce exposure by default, as with common wallet behavior that avoids reuse.
“Old BTC risk” is therefore largely a property of historical output types and reuse patterns and not something that suddenly applies evenly to every coin.
The second, more practical constraint is capacity. Even if a post-quantum migration were socially agreed upon, it would still be a blockspace and coordination problem.
River’s explainer summarizes academic estimates showing how sensitive timelines are to assumptions. A theoretical scenario in which all transactions are migrations can compress timelines dramatically, while more realistic blockspace allocation stretches a transition into years, even before accounting for governance and adoption.
BTQ’s testnet fits into that bucket. It lets engineers observe the operational costs of post-quantum signatures, including larger data sizes and different limits, in a Bitcoin-like setting, without claiming that Bitcoin is imminently breakable.
What Bitcoin-level mitigation might look like
At the protocol level, quantum preparedness is often discussed as a sequenced path.
Post-quantum signature schemes tend to be much larger than elliptic-curve signatures, which have knock-on effects for transaction size, bandwidth and verification costs; the same kinds of trade-offs BTQ is surfacing by experimenting with ML-DSA.
That is why some Bitcoin proposals focus first on reducing the most structural exposure within existing script designs, without committing the network to a specific post-quantum signature algorithm immediately.
A recent example is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 360, which proposes a new output type called Pay-to-Tapscript-Hash (P2TSH). P2TSH is nearly identical to Taproot but removes the key-path spend, the path that relies on elliptic-curve signatures, leaving a tapscript-native route that can be used in ways intended to avoid that key-path dependency.
Related ideas have circulated on the Bitcoin developer mailing list under the broader “hash-only” or “script-spend” Taproot family, often discussed as Pay-to-Quantum-Resistant-Hash (P2QRH)-style constructions. These proposals again aim to reuse Taproot’s structure while skipping the quantum-vulnerable key spend.
Importantly, none of this is settled. The main point is that Bitcoin’s likely response, if it moves, is debated as an incremental coordination problem that balances conservatism, compatibility and the cost of changing the transaction format.
The BTQ testnet is quite revealing
BTQ’s Bitcoin Quantum testnet does not settle the quantum debate, but it does make two points harder to ignore.
First, most credible threat models focus on where public keys are already exposed, which is why “old coin” patterns keep appearing in analyses.
Second, post-quantum Bitcoin is an engineering and coordination problem. BTQ Technologies’ own design choices, such as moving to ML-DSA and lifting block limits to accommodate much larger signatures, illustrate those trade-offs.
Ultimately, the testnet is a sandbox for measuring costs and constraints and should not be seen as proof that Bitcoin is imminently breakable.

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