Good morning! (Or GM, for all those in crypto.) Ben Weiss from Fortune Crypto here, filling in for Anne Sraders and Jessica Mathews.
Crypto is still chilly, and this applies even more so to non-fungible tokens, those buzzy digital collectibles that auction houses like Christie’s were once selling for tens of millions of dollars.
In January 2022, at its height, the NFT market saw about $6 billion in monthly sales, according to CryptoSlam. However, July saw a bit less than $500 million, and, unlike the rest of crypto —Bitcoin is up almost 60% year to date—it hasn’t seen a bottom, as sales continue to slump.
This downturn doesn’t bode well for startups that raised tens of millions of dollars at the beginning of the NFT craze, and “wind-downs” are becoming more and more common as once-trendy startups are dropping like flies amid a parched funding landscape.
Last Friday, RECUR, which raked in seed funding of $5 million in March 2021 and then another $50 million at a $333 million valuation later that year, announced that it was winding down operations…