People are still buying NFTs, but the market looks completely different now compared to that insane 2021/22 peak. Sales have cooled from over $1 billion a month down to around $300 million recently, but here's what's interesting - the people asking are people still buying nfts seem to miss the real story.

Yat Siu from Animoca Brands made a solid point at a recent crypto conference: wealthy collectors never really left. They're still active, still accumulating, just more selective about what they're buying. Think about it like the art world - a Picasso collector isn't going to stop collecting just because the market gets choppy. Same logic applies to digital assets.

Siu's own portfolio is down about 80%, but he's not sweating it because these were never meant to be flips. Long-term holds. The collectors who remain in the space tend to think the same way. You've got billionaires quietly accumulating things like virtual land parcels and rare digital collectibles, but they're not doing it for quick gains.

What's wild is how people perceive this. Five years ago, the NFT market literally didn't exist. Now we're talking about hundreds of millions in monthly volume. Are people still buying nfts? Obviously yes, but the question reveals how short-term most market observers are thinking.

The real headwind isn't the market itself - it's external. NFT Paris got canceled, which signals something bigger: Europe's turning cold on crypto generally. France went from pro-crypto to basically hostile. There's been a string of kidnappings targeting crypto executives in the region, and honestly, that's a bigger factor than market sentiment. Security concerns are keeping people away from major events.

So are people still buying nfts? The data says yes. But it's a different crowd now - patient collectors with conviction, not the wave of retail FOMO from a few years back. The blockchain has all the data if you want to verify it yourself.