NFTs, in the short span of time they became as hot as the word "blog" in the early 2000's, have earned themselves a slot in internet history and most of it isn't pretty. Let's take a quick look at the events that drew the entire world's attention -- from eye-watering gains that made millionaires to jaw dropping collapses in the digital ecosphere:

• March 2019 -  A Hollywood elite artist Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) sells an NFT collage for $69,346 on Nifty Gateway. This kicks off interest in cryptoart and he drives the hype train doing a whole round of interviews. Professing to be a kind of Michelangelo of CGI art pieces, his NFT mints go for tens of thousands of dollars in ETH. People really think they will be able to hodl out until these masterpieces are worth millions!
• February 2021 - NFT mania erupts full on.  Beeple sells at Christie's auction house for $69.3 million for a single NFT.  $2 billion in trading volume that month alone on platforms like OpenSea. Solana begins to warm up as prospectors wake up with the word "gains" ringing in their ears. Whitelist grind-mania also picks up on Discord. Bad faith PFPs launch: With little oversight, opportunistic developers rush to launch profile pic (PFP) NFT projects on Solana. Many of these are low effort, bad faith projects.
• May 2021 - NBA releases Top Shot NFTs of basketball highlights. Legitimacy is great, but will these sports NFTs hold people's interest? Will all these sales result in gains, or simply wasteful spending?
• Generally in 2021 - Tradewashing is rife. The same bros pumping up new unknown discord groups are also talking to their money bag guys in private Telegram groups and in Twitter DMs to pump up prices, retweet, push on their idiot followers whatever. Fiverr provides the fodder of good looking CGI art and other vector art based frogs, dogs, slugs, palm trees and more. "Throw up a website, a candy machine and mint the heck out of it then abandon the Discord group!" becomes a secret motto among these criminal manipulators. Their followers number in the millions, many of them artificial. Basketball players, crypto "experts" and celebs are all in this pot of criminal, shadowy merchants of false hope.
• November 2021 - Land madness. Attach "land" to any NFT's name, regardless of the status of game development and make an insane profit.  The Sandbox sells $144 million in virtual land NFTs in one week. Numerous similar projects rake in millions...with or without an actual game!
• January 2022 - Instability of Bitcoin and crypto markets make greedy developers of bad faith projects pull out the rug from under NFT hodlers. Developers abandon projects and make off with, in all likelihood, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ETH and SOL funds. 
• February 2022 - NFT values drop with Bitcoin's collapse. A relentless drop in value estimation. Sales and value of NFTs take a powerful hit, again and again. Trading volume on OpenSea drops from nearly $5 billion in January to $2.5 billion in February. ETH value drops.  Wax nft sales drop.
• Spring 2022 - Continued decline - As the oppressive crypto bear market continues, NFT values keep falling. High-profile NFTs that sold for millions are now worth fractions. Bored Ape values dropped around 70%. Still, the bros are at it again, putting their signature bad faith marker on dozens of Opensea collections. Wax is a graveyard with Alien Worlds' lands losing value drastically.

Highlights:

• The proliferation of PFP projects flooded the markets on MagicEden and OS, causing valuations to crash. Trash copycats. Ugly, perversely lacking in taste "degen nfts". Trash non responsive discord mods. Peak prices of 5-10 SOL for many PFPs quickly drop to 0.5 SOL or less within months as speculators flee. Invisible ETH "Brands" promising elite access!
• On November 7, 2021, Solana (SOL) hits its all time high of $260.06 as hype peaks. It dropped to lows of $17/SOL and is lately swimming just above $30/SOL. Oh how far thou art fallen, Solana.
• The repeated network outages and arbitrary governance demonstrated that centralized blockchains like Solana cannot provide the reliability, security, and trust needed to sustainably govern a decentralized ecosystem. Hard-coded decentralization and smart contracts are essential.

The Graveyard of Meme Dreams: 2023-

Only die-hards remain. Telegram, Twitter and Discord groups of the toughest Diamond Hands around have buckled, melted from the oppression of the current bear.

NFT trading volume remains down 90%, or more from its peak. Most casual speculators have left the market. Many game developers closed down their companies from lack of continued NFT sales. Covid relief checks may have fueled one of the last true hypish periods of NFT sales.

Dedicated collectors and true believers remain engaged in the niche NFT community.  

• Values for most projects remain a fraction of peak prices. 
• Depressed, oppressive financial markets and crypto at large deflate all hype and hope in NFTs long-term
• Short term, rug pullers find their usual million dollar days are now hundred dollar days - as their pool of victims "got smart" and are primarily faced with extreme dollar inflation at home, gas prices, etc
• Good faith projects die off in great numbers as die hard fans flee