Image credit: Shin Suzuki

Disclaimer: This story was originally published on September 20, 2024.

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Celebrated Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami has announced that he will no longer release non-fungible tokens (NFTs) after entering the market in late 2021.

Speaking with The Guardian in a Sept. 20 interview at the Asian Art Museum as part of his new solo art exhibition dubbed “Unfamiliar People,” Murakami said, “Maybe I’m done releasing NFTs.”

However, the report said the artist remains hopeful that, with time, NFTs will prove to be an artistic movement beyond anything since pop art. “It’s an artist’s job and vocation to present fresh ideas,” he added. “Expanding NFTs into fine art is what I’m fully pursuing right now.”

Haruki Murakami is a globally recognized artist whose career dates back to the late 1980s. He has launched two NFT collections so far — the Clone X collection in collaboration with RTFKT in December 2021, and the Murakami.Flowers collection in May 2022.

Notably, Murakami delayed the launch of Murakami.Flowers to fine-tune it before eventually rolling it out in May 2022 as the crypto and NFT markets crashed. After the launch, Murakami apologized to buyers of his NFTs due to stagnant sales and floor prices. However, the community understood that broader market factors influenced the situation.

Murakami.Flowers has since generated 26,713 Ether (ETH) or $42.52 million worth of secondary trading volume to date, with an NFT floor price of 0.36 ETH ($573), according to data from OpenSea.

In September, crypto content platform dappGambl released a report on the “evolving landscape” of NFTs, which shows that 95% of NFTs owned by more than 23 million investors have no value.

The study, which analyzed 73,257 NFT collections, found that 69,795 of the collections have a market capitalization of zero Ether (ETH). Additionally, it revealed that less than 1% of all NFTs are valued at over $6,000, indicating rarity in high-value assets.