Are NFTs Back?

Over the past week, crypto’s heavyweights have been flat, with BTC up 1%, ETH down 1%, SOL down 2%, and etc. Sentiments have improved since a month ago, sure, but it’s anyone’s guess what happens next, and another downward break wouldn’t be surprising considering how 2026 has gone so far.

What is surprising, though, is where we’re having outperformances right now, namely top Ethereum L1Ethereum is the largest smart contact blockchain platform with an extensive decentralized ecosystem.View Profile” class=”stubHighlight”> Ethereum NFT projects. Surprising because the NFT bear market has been particularly brutal in recent months, and if the major coins are flat, you’d expect the same or worse for NFTs in this current environment.

However, we’ve been seeing significant rallies in Ethereum collections, particularly PFP projects. Pulling together data from CoinGecko’s NFT page, it’s clear that buy pressure is picking up:

Why these rallies, then? From my vantage, there admittedly doesn’t appear to be a singular obvious catalyst at the moment, and this makes it harder to gauge the momentum.

Perhaps the top NFTs have been too oversold for too long relative to their potentialities, and they’re entering a new recovery period; or perhaps this is just a temporary hopium rally in the absence of obvious higher-beta plays in Ethereum DeFi right now and not the beginning of the next big NFT market breakout.

Only time will tell, but in the meantime it’s worth keeping our perspective zoomed out. This new action does feel promising after a brutal bear, yet the current market cap of NFTs is $2B, and the last time the NFT market was this small was the summer of 2021. The reality is that it doesn’t take as much money to move the prices of NFTs today as it would have in April 2022 or March 2024 when the market cap of NFTs was over $16B and $10B, respectively.

So while we might be in “wait and see” mode for now, what would change the picture here is if we start seeing sustained volume and not just floor price movements, and if buying pressure starts extending beyond the biggest collections into smaller projects.

The NFT market has had false dawns before, of course, but it’s also true that every recovery starts somewhere, and sometimes with exactly this kind of quieter, unheralded uptrend. At the very least, this will be a thread to keep an eye on throughout May.