The 10 Biggest NFT Stories of 2025
2025 wasn’t a euphoric NFT year, but it was an important year for the NFT space nonetheless. It had cultural flashpoints, infra breakthroughs, regulatory resets, and a few genuine manias. That said, let's recap the 10 happenings that mattered most here in my opinion!
The SEC Ended Its NFT Cases
Crypto-friendly leadership took over at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this year, followed by a wave of investigation closures into onchain projects, including NFT teams like OpenSea, Yuga Labs, and CyberKongz. For now, then, it's clear NFTs aren’t inherently securities in America, despite what Gary Gensler’s SEC implied with its 2023 enforcements against Impact Theory and Stoner Cats.
Hypurr Drop Reminiscent of 2021
NFT collectibles had a relatively quiet year overall, but the post-drop trading frenzy around the Hyperliquid ecosystem's Hypurr collection was the closest 2025 came to reliving 2021's bull run energy. The project sparked ~$45 million in first-day volume and produced multiple six-figure sales for rares, including one north of $470,000. No other NFT launch has managed to approach this sort of demand this cycle.
GONDI's Bear Market Resistance
While there was a general downturn in NFT trading in 2025, NFT lending platform GONDI had a standout year. Alongside major infra upgrades, like V3 lending, native NFT trading, and peer-to-peer swaps, the platform facilitated multiple +$1M XCOPY sales and a permissionless extension of the largest onchain NFT loan to date: $2.75M USDC against the rarest seven-trait CryptoPunk.
Tokenized Pokémon Cards Surged
Another bullish pocket of NFT activity in 2025 came via Pokémon cards tokenized onchain. This format paved the way to gacha-style digital “pack rips,” where users pay to open randomized pulls with possible rare, high-value outcomes. The mechanic clearly resonated, as more than $600M was spent on Pokémon TCG gacha activity across platforms like Courtyard, Collector Crypt, and Phygitals this year.
The AB500 Announcement
Art Blocks brought generative art into Ethereum’s mainstream after launching in Nov. 2020. 5 years later, Art Blocks solidified its legacy with AB500, formally sealing its first 500 projects as a complete foundational set. The cap reframes these initial releases as a canon and signals a shift from perpetual Art Blocks Curated drops toward preservation, tooling, and new generative Studio and Engine collaborations.
Bitcoin's NFT Schism
Bitcoin’s NFT debate escalated in 2025 from cultural grumbling into open governance conflict. The v30 update to Bitcoin Core that made data storage cheaper and more flexible reignited backlash against meta-protocols like Ordinals, with critics labeling Bitcoin NFTs as spam and reviving soft-fork rhetoric. The technical dispute has now turned into a broader fight over Bitcoin’s neutrality and long-term identity.
TokenStrategy Arrived
One team that did bring considerable excitement back to NFT collectibles this year was TokenWorks, namely through its PunkStrategy, NFTStrategy, and TokenStrategy releases. By complementing NFTs with liquid, tradable strategy tokens that are designed for symbiotic flywheels, the project created a surge of interest in this space the likes of which few NFT experiments have managed since 2021.
New ERC-8004 Standard
ERC-8004 was introduced in Aug. 2025 as a mechanism to bring trustlessness to AI agents onchain. Its identity layer relies on ERC-721 NFTs to represent agents and make them ownable and tradable. The standard quickly gained traction on testnet, and with an early 2026 mainnet rollout ahead, ERC-8004 should increasingly converge with other AI standards, like A2A and x402 (e.g. Daydreams), into a major new coordination layer.
DX Terminal's Trading Game
One of the largest crypto gaming events of 2025 came via DX Terminal, an AI-driven financial simulation built by DX Research Group on Base. Nearly 4,000 players made +2M simulated trades via +36,000 NFT-based agents, with secondary trading volume having since surpassed $100M. The title showed that hybrid AI-onchain games can scale from being niche experiments into genuine mass-participation spectacles.
CryptoPunks in MoMA
This December, the Museum of Modern Art added CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles to its permanent collection. The coordinated community donation effort further canonized these major NFTs as new media art worthy of institutional history, and their advance here suggests we'll see similar efforts with other leading museums in the years ahead.