Justin Bieber's $1.3M NFT Now Listed for Just $2,800

From $1.3 Million to $2,800: The Collapse of NFTs

In January 2022, Justin Bieber paid $1.3 million for Bored Ape #3001, a digital monkey illustration from the BAYC collection. Months later, he added #3850 for $440,000: the market was already deflating, and prices revealed it. The trinc year, after a widespread crypto market crash, both assets had lost nearly 90% of their value, totaling around $120,000. By late 2025, according to The Independent, the highest bid for one of those apes barely reached $2,800.

Bieber’s case is not an anomaly. It is the pattern of a bubble sold as a technological revolution that ended up being, for many, simply a machine to extract money from latecomers.

Jack Dorsey’s First Tweet: From $2.9 Million to $280

The most brutal example isn’t the monkeys. In March 2021, an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, founder of Twitter, sold for $2.9 million. The buyer was Sina Estavi, a Malaysian-Iranian crypto entrepreneur. When he tried to resell it in April 2022, the highest bid received was $280.

From seven figures to three. In less than a year. The drop wasn’t a market accident: it confirmed that the asset never had the value attributed to it. What was paid wasn’t the drawing, the token, or exclusivity. It was the expectation of reselling it higher to someone even more excited.

Why NFTs Were Used for Money Laundering

According to several analyses, the real utility of these assets wasn’t art. Interest lay not in the work, but in subjective valuation: an asset whose price cannot be disputed with objective criteria is the perfect vehicle for moving profits between fiscal years or generating accounting results at convenience. In practice, this equals a digital laundering factory.

The other leg of the business was publicity. When a celebrity appears buying an NFT for a million, the news generates headlines, and headlines generate buyers. Some argue those purchases were actually payments for covert advertising: the celebrity gets paid for visibility and claims to have paid a fortune so novices consider the asset valuable. There is no confirmation of this extreme, but the mechanism fits the price sequence.

How Much Are Artistic NFTs Worth Today?

Almost nothing. According to cited studies, it is likely that 95% of artistic NFTs currently have no value. This is not a catastrophic estimate: it is the liquidation of a market built on pure speculation.

The distinction matters. Bitcoin has defenders with concrete arguments—instant liquidity, ability to move capital without customs controls, resistance to expropriation—and very different is a token representing ownership of a drawing. The former has a function; the latter, a narrative. When the narrative runs out, the price goes to zero.

The Metaverse That Never Arrived

The NFT bubble came with a travel companion: the metaverse. It was promised we would buy hams made of zeros and ones, have parallel lives in virtual universes, and swords from some franchise would be investments comparable to olive groves. None of that peine.

The pattern repeats: first media enthusiasm, then mass arrival of retail investors, and finally the collapse. When all economic and general media talk non-stop about the new investment, the signal is not to buy. It is to exit.

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The sequence is always the same. First, millions are spent; then the purchase is justified by technology; finally, it is discovered the asset was only worth what someone was willing to pay for it. Bieber’s ape still exists. Its price does not.