NFTs Are Back — 18 Million Sales Mark the Biggest Comeback Since 2022

The JPEGs didn’t die — they evolved. After two years underground, NFTs are back on-chain and louder than ever.

⚡ Quick Hits

• 🖼️ NFTs sold (Q3 2025): 18.1M (+45% QoQ)
• 💰 Trading volume: $1.6B
• 👛 Active wallets: 2.14M (+28.6%)
• 🏟️ Sports NFTs: +337% to $71M
• 🎮 Gaming NFTs: –32% in sales, –17% in volume
• 💎 DeFi TVL: $237B (all-time high)

🚀 From Slump to Surge

Two years of silence — and suddenly, the NFTs are back. Q3 2025 saw 18.1 million NFTs sold, the highest count since the 2022 mania. Trading volume hit $1.6 billion, up 45% from Q2 — a signal that NFT veterans are back in full swing.

But the twist? Prices aren’t soaring — activity is. Traders are flipping more assets faster at smaller margins. Average NFTs per wallet jumped from 4.2 to 8.4, meaning the OGs are doubling down while newcomers still hesitate.

The NFT revival isn’t retail FOMO — it’s old money reloading.

🏟️ Winners & Losers: Sports Go Pro, Gaming Slips

The revival isn’t uniform. Gaming NFTs, once the poster child of adoption, are down 32% in sales and 17% in volume — a far cry from the Axie Infinity glory days.

Meanwhile, sports NFTs are the new meta: +337% volume surge to $71M, powered by Sorare’s fantasy leagues for football, baseball, and basketball.

As new sports seasons rolled out, Sorare’s volumes exploded — 4.1 million NFTs sold, proving fans still want digital collectibles when there’s real-world action behind them.

💸 Airdrops, OGs, and the OpenSea Hustle

This comeback isn’t organic — it’s engineered. OpenSea lit the fuse with a token airdrop campaign, rewarding active traders. The result: a 29% jump in transactions and 9.27 million assets sold on the platform.

Meanwhile, OG collections like CryptoPunks, BAYC, Moonbirds, and Pudgy Penguins came roaring back. The PFP category surged 187% to $544M in quarterly volume.

• Pudgy Penguins transformed into a Web3 entertainment empire.
• Moonbirds, revived by Orange Cap Games, logged 8,311 sales and $88M volume.
• The upcoming $BIRB token on Solana reignited NFT Twitter.
• Even Yuga Labs is refocusing on its roots — BAYC, MAYC, and the Otherside metaverse.

This isn’t the JPEG casino anymore. It’s the franchise era of NFTs.

🪙 NFTs Are Becoming DeFi

The biggest shift isn’t visual — it’s financial. NFTs are morphing into programmable assets that generate yield, collateralize loans, and represent tokenized real-world items.

Examples leading the charge:

• Courtyard: tokenizes real-world collectible cards (Pokémon, baseball) into NFTs — $145M volume in Q3.
• PunkStrategy: turns CryptoPunks exposure into a fungible $PNKSTR token, using trading fees to buy, relist, and burn NFTs — a DeFi feedback loop.

The message? The JPEG era is over — welcome to NFT-as-Asset.

📉 AI & SocialFi Fade, NFTs Rise

While NFTs stage a comeback, other sectors are cooling hard.

• 🧠 AI dapps: 4.8M → 3.1M daily wallets (–35%)
• 💬 SocialFi apps: 3.8M → 1.57M (–59%)
• 🎮 Gaming: still the largest, but shrinking share
• 🖼️ NFTs: now the #2 dapp category with 18.5% market share

For the first time since 2022, NFTs are more active than DeFi and AI combined. The cultural liquidity is shifting back — from code to collectibles, from automation to ownership.

💰 DeFi Breaks Records, Ethereum Softens

While NFTs reawaken, DeFi is booming:

• TVL: $237B (ATH)
• Ethereum: still dominant at $119B, but –4% QoQ
• Solana: down 33% to $13.8B
• Hyperliquid: up 29% to $2.85B

The convergence is real — NFT liquidity is bleeding into DeFi, and vice versa. Both sectors now operate as one ecosystem: tokenized value in motion.

🔮 The Road Ahead: From Collectibles to Capital Markets

Forget speculative apes — the new NFT era is about utility, tokenization, and liquidity design. NFTs are evolving into the infrastructure of ownership — digital, physical, financial.

With OpenSea’s token drop, Moonbirds’ $BIRB, and Courtyard’s physical-to-digital model, NFTs are entering their capital market phase.

“Traders aren’t chasing hype anymore,” one analyst said. “They’re engineering liquidity.”

TL;DR

• 🖼️ 18.1M NFTs sold in Q3 2025 (+45% QoQ)
• 💰 $1.6B trading volume — highest since 2022
• 🏟️ Sports NFTs soar +337%; Gaming slumps
• 💎 OG collections surge — BAYC, Punks, Moonbirds
• 🪙 NFTs merge with DeFi — yield, tokenization, automation
• 📉 AI & SocialFi fade — NFTs reclaim the spotlight