What internet fad will replace NFTs now they are all but worthless?

With last month's report that 95% of them are now worthless, I think it's just about safe to say that the NFT moment is finally over. Phew. There really was a six-week period at the start of last year when I thought I was going to have to attach my digital soul for ever to a really bad picture of a monkey with a tentacle coming out of its nose and mouth. I kept practising saying, "No, it's actually quite cool! It's good. And it only cost me about as much as a car!" in the mirror a lot, with a ghoulish rictus grin.

- Joel Golby

NFT, as was probably explained to you hundreds of times from January 2021 to May 2022, stands for "nonfungible token", and essentially means you can buy a code that says you own a digital asset, which is then stored on the blockchain, a sort of centralised public transaction ledger. There were a lot of hyped future uses for this technology, but for the most part it was used to buy jpegs of monkeys, or maybe sometimes a lion.

Before the boom, there were whispers that the NFT community would transform the way people viewed and bought and thought about art and collectibles, and there were some technological advancements pushed during that time that will have a positive impact on whatever the next iteration of the internet will be. But what the short, sharp NFT hype cycle will mainly be remembered for will be: insanely bad art, hyper-inflated prices, digital hucksterism, $17bn of sales in 2021 and a 90% sales drop in 2022, John Terry, and that one mate everyone has who spent thousands on one and now goes really quiet whenever the subject of NFTs comes up in conversation.