NFTs didn’t die. They just stopped being about profile pictures and floor prices, and started becoming the invisible plumbing of actual finance.
Paul Brody, Chair of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, put it plainly: “Everything will be an NFT. It’s happening in financial markets right now.”
Everything will be an NFT. It's happening in financial markets right now. Like so many of these predictions, they weren't wrong: they just took longer than anticipated. https://t.co/SGK3kTZHsC
— Paul Brody prbrody.eth (@pbrody) February 24, 2026
He was replying to the old 2021 prediction that once sounded like hype. Turns out it was just early.
Look at what’s already live onchain today:
Polymarket uses conditional ERC-1155 tokens for every Yes/No market outcome. Uniswap V3 and V4 liquidity positions are ERC-721 NFTs you can trade or collateralize.
Liquity borrowers hold their Trove debt positions as transferable ERC-721s. Sablier turns recurring payment streams into ERC-721s.
Flaunch issues royalty NFTs that give holders a cut of a memecoin’s trading fees. ETH Strategy packages long bonds with embedded call options as ERC-721s.
These are core DeFi primitives that happen to use the NFT standard because it’s the cleanest way to make something ownable, transferable, and programmable onchain, not “NFT projects.”
The Bankless piece calls this the quiet invasion: NFTs moving from cultural collectibles into the actual machinery of finance and business.
Every new use case proves the format is more flexible than anyone expected in 2021.
Meanwhile, the old-school NFT trading narrative looks very different
aiNFT (formerly APENFT, founded by Justin Sun) is billed as the biggest NFT marketplace on Tron.
Its 24-hour volume? Roughly $6.24. Weekly volume on the top collection sits at about $43.68.
The platform has quietly pivoted hard into AI features, “BANK OF AI“, AI agent launchpad, multi-agent frameworks, because it looks like pure NFT trading simply isn’t moving the needle anymore.
The real story
The hype cycle around JPEGs and floor sweeps is over.
What replaced it is far more interesting: NFTs becoming the standard way to represent ownership of onchain state, whether that’s a liquidity position, a debt obligation, a revenue share, or a recurring payment.
For crypto-curious institutional and retail readers, this is the shift that actually matters. You don’t need another PFP collection. You need tools that make NFT DeFi positions portable, collaterالizable, and composable.
And that’s exactly what NFTs are delivering, quietly, every day. The invasion is not loud. But it’s already here.
Cryptocurrency and Web3 expert, founder of Kriptoworld
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With years of experience covering the blockchain space, András delivers insightful reporting on DeFi, tokenization, altcoins, and crypto regulations shaping the digital economy.
📅 Published: February 27, 2026 • 🕓 Last updated: February 27, 2026
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