When you have no skin in the game, NFT failures become amusing stories – especially when poor decisions made by smug celebrities end up costing them millions of dollars. Here’s a list of 2022’s biggest NFT failures.
Read, laugh, learn – and try not to repeat their mistakes.
Ellen DeGeneres
Speaking of celebrities, first up on the list of NFT failures is the talk show host’s latest debacle.
In March 2021, she released her digital art collection, Woman with Stick Cat, alongside a video monologue of herself, announcing her foray into NFTs. The collection featured DeGeneres taking a selfie with a stick figure sketch of a cat and had 2 different editions: Gold and Silver.
Priced at $2,500 each, only 5 of the 10 Gold edition NFTs sold out. The Silver edition performed equally poorly, generating just $6,400 from 64 buyers.
Bear in mind this happened at a time when Cryptopunks’ rare punk NFT sold for $23.7 million.
Melania Trump
Next on the list is the ex-First Lady of the United States. Melania Trump’s NFT, Head of State Collection, 2022, features an autographed white hat worn by Trump during a 2018 visit with French President Emanuel Macron, along with a painting of her wearing the hat.
The opening bid of the auction was 1,800 SOL, which would have been equivalent to $250,000 at the time. By the time the auction closed, there were shockingly fewer bids, 5, to be exact. An additional blow was all the bids barely crossed the threshold price.
Finally, the NFT was sold for roughly $170,000 — about $80,000 less than the asking price, making critics deem it a colossal failure.
Mike Tyson
Iron Mike collaborated with emerging artist Cory Van Lew to create the NFT Young Mike. The collection depicts moments from the life of Mike Tyson. While it is the “reimagination and interpretation” of the artist, Tyson himself provided “creative oversight and mentorship in the artistic process.”
The NFT collection launched to feverish anticipation and excitement. As a result of FOMO, the demand and prices were unsurprisingly high. But with time, both plummeted. And today, the floor price of the NFT collection is just 0.12 ETH.
Fans of the celeb boxer are now expressing their dismay over such a massive failure, as they count their losses and accuse Tyson of shilling a useless project.