If you’ve been skulking around the secondary markets lately, you already know the mood. It’s early 2026, and the speculative frenzy of the early 2020s now feels less like a crash and more like a hallucination we collectively snapped out of. What we’ve woken up to isn’t panic. It’s quiet. An unnerving, structural quiet.

I spend my mornings sipping freshly brewed coffee and watching the movement (or more accurately, the lack of it) in collections that were once considered untouchable. Not because I expect fireworks, but because stillness, in markets like these, is rarely neutral. What’s emerged isn’t a bear market in the classical sense, but a stalemate.

On one side sit the Diamond Hands... collectors who absorbed the drawdowns and now refuse to part with work they still believe in at prices they consider insulting. On the other are the Ghost Bidders... automated, opportunistic and increasingly indistinguishable from one another, placing bids not out of conviction but habit. Between them lies a market that technically exists, but barely functions.

The modest “recovery” seen in early 2026 (headlines pointing to a few hundred million dollars tacked back onto aggregate market caps) feels more like a statistical twitch than a regime shift. Most of the liquidity circulating right now isn’t human. It’s bots fighting over ever thinner spreads, scraping for 0.01 ETH margins in a market that no longer rewards speed or volume.

This creates a dangerous illusion of stability. Take collections with extremely low listing rates. On the surface, this looks bullish... no one wants to sell. In practice, it often signals paralysis. When exits are scarce, the floor price stops being a meaningful signal of demand and starts functioning as a placeholder. A number maintained by absence rather than appetite.

You can’t panic sell if there’s no one on the other side of the trade... And you can’t discover price if nothing is allowed to clear...

The floor, in other words, becomes a fiction. A social agreement between holders and bots that everyone pretends means something.

What thin liquidity does (quietly, relentlessly) is force time back into the equation.

Speculative markets collapse time. They reward immediacy, reflex and narrative velocity. Art, by contrast, requires duration. When liquidity dries up, collectors are forced to reveal their true time preference:. Were they buying compressed upside, or were they buying something they were prepared to live with?

This is where the stalemate sharpens into a filter.

The flippers are gone, not because they were chased out, but because there’s nothing left for them to do. What remains is a smaller, more deliberate ecosystem of collectors who understand that these works may not offer clean exits, neat charts, or satisfying liquidity events. They are collecting under conditions that more closely resemble traditional art markets than crypto casinos.

That shift is uncomfortable, especially for a space that grew up on instant feedback. But it’s also clarifying.

This is the part that’s easy to misread.

The quiet has been mistaken by many as failure. In reality, it looks more like integration. Digital art hasn’t been abandoned by institutions... it’s been absorbed. Folded into broader categories. Treated less as a novelty and more as a medium. Read more about my thoughts in Institutionalisation here 👇🏾

That move comes with tradeoffs. Museumisation slows everything down. It reduces turnover, narrows taste and privileges endurance over experimentation. Some artists will be stranded by it. Some important work may never recover price discovery. Cultural value and financial value may permanently decouple.

But it also does something crucial... it removes the need for constant justification. Work no longer has to perform as a product demo for the technology that produced it. Code-as-art is allowed to exist as art, full stop.

For projects built around the idea of the blockchain as a canvas rather than a distribution channel, this is less a comedown than a homecoming.

The current market rewards patience. It favours collectors willing to do their own curation, to transact privately and to wait for the rare moments when conviction finally breaks on one side or the other.

There are pieces sitting at prices today that would have been unthinkable three years ago. Not because they’ve failed, but because the market no longer knows how to talk about them. Liquidity is thin, discovery is slow and the old signals no longer work.

That doesn’t make this a “buyer’s market” in the usual sense. It makes it a commitment market. Entry without exit guarantees forces honesty.

👉🏾 The floor is a fiction. It’s maintained by bots and collective refusal, not demand. Real value surfaces elsewhere.

👉🏾 Signatures matter more than polish. When technical competence is everywhere, the tell lies in the underlying architecture of a work. The rules, constraints and systems that actually generate it.

👉🏾 Time is no longer optional. Collect only what you’re prepared to hold through boredom, obscurity and the possibility that the market never returns to its former highs.

This lull isn’t a death spiral. It’s a purification by friction. The noise is gone, not because the art failed, but because the market finally stopped shouting over it.

And for the first time in years, that silence feels earned.

If you’ve been skulking around the secondary markets lately, you already know the mood. It’s early 2026, and the speculative frenzy of the early 2020s now feels less like a crash and more like a hallucination we collectively snapped out of. What we’ve woken up to isn’t panic. It’s quiet. An unnerving, structural quiet.

I spend my mornings sipping freshly brewed coffee and watching the movement (or more accurately, the lack of it) in collections that were once considered untouchable. Not because I expect fireworks, but because stillness, in markets like these, is rarely neutral. What’s emerged isn’t a bear market in the classical sense, but a stalemate.

On one side sit the Diamond Hands... collectors who absorbed the drawdowns and now refuse to part with work they still believe in at prices they consider insulting. On the other are the Ghost Bidders... automated, opportunistic and increasingly indistinguishable from one another, placing bids not out of conviction but habit. Between them lies a market that technically exists, but barely functions.

The modest “recovery” seen in early 2026 (headlines pointing to a few hundred million dollars tacked back onto aggregate market caps) feels more like a statistical twitch than a regime shift. Most of the liquidity circulating right now isn’t human. It’s bots fighting over ever thinner spreads, scraping for 0.01 ETH margins in a market that no longer rewards speed or volume.

This creates a dangerous illusion of stability. Take collections with extremely low listing rates. On the surface, this looks bullish... no one wants to sell. In practice, it often signals paralysis. When exits are scarce, the floor price stops being a meaningful signal of demand and starts functioning as a placeholder. A number maintained by absence rather than appetite.

You can’t panic sell if there’s no one on the other side of the trade... And you can’t discover price if nothing is allowed to clear...

The floor, in other words, becomes a fiction. A social agreement between holders and bots that everyone pretends means something.

What thin liquidity does (quietly, relentlessly) is force time back into the equation.

Speculative markets collapse time. They reward immediacy, reflex and narrative velocity. Art, by contrast, requires duration. When liquidity dries up, collectors are forced to reveal their true time preference:. Were they buying compressed upside, or were they buying something they were prepared to live with?

This is where the stalemate sharpens into a filter.

The flippers are gone, not because they were chased out, but because there’s nothing left for them to do. What remains is a smaller, more deliberate ecosystem of collectors who understand that these works may not offer clean exits, neat charts, or satisfying liquidity events. They are collecting under conditions that more closely resemble traditional art markets than crypto casinos.

That shift is uncomfortable, especially for a space that grew up on instant feedback. But it’s also clarifying.

This is the part that’s easy to misread.

The quiet has been mistaken by many as failure. In reality, it looks more like integration. Digital art hasn’t been abandoned by institutions... it’s been absorbed. Folded into broader categories. Treated less as a novelty and more as a medium. Read more about my thoughts in Institutionalisation here 👇🏾

That move comes with tradeoffs. Museumisation slows everything down. It reduces turnover, narrows taste and privileges endurance over experimentation. Some artists will be stranded by it. Some important work may never recover price discovery. Cultural value and financial value may permanently decouple.

But it also does something crucial... it removes the need for constant justification. Work no longer has to perform as a product demo for the technology that produced it. Code-as-art is allowed to exist as art, full stop.

For projects built around the idea of the blockchain as a canvas rather than a distribution channel, this is less a comedown than a homecoming.

The current market rewards patience. It favours collectors willing to do their own curation, to transact privately and to wait for the rare moments when conviction finally breaks on one side or the other.

There are pieces sitting at prices today that would have been unthinkable three years ago. Not because they’ve failed, but because the market no longer knows how to talk about them. Liquidity is thin, discovery is slow and the old signals no longer work.

That doesn’t make this a “buyer’s market” in the usual sense. It makes it a commitment market. Entry without exit guarantees forces honesty.

👉🏾 The floor is a fiction. It’s maintained by bots and collective refusal, not demand. Real value surfaces elsewhere.

👉🏾 Signatures matter more than polish. When technical competence is everywhere, the tell lies in the underlying architecture of a work. The rules, constraints and systems that actually generate it.

👉🏾 Time is no longer optional. Collect only what you’re prepared to hold through boredom, obscurity and the possibility that the market never returns to its former highs.

This lull isn’t a death spiral. It’s a purification by friction. The noise is gone, not because the art failed, but because the market finally stopped shouting over it.

And for the first time in years, that silence feels earned.