Non-Fungible Tokens as Investment

William N. Goetzmann; Dong Huang; Milad Nozari

doi:10.3386/w34837

Non-Fungible Tokens as Investment

William N. Goetzmann, Dong Huang & Milad Nozari

Working Paper 34837

DOI 10.3386/w34837

Issue Date February 2026

NFTs provided an extraordinary real-time laboratory for bubble economics: returns were exceptionally right-skewed, illiquidity pervaded even the most active platforms, and a handful of trades drove aggregate performance. Investors extrapolating from realized returns without recognizing selection bias and survivorship faced a substantial risk of disappointment. As our data and simulations confirm, successful NFT investing during the bubble required an almost perfect confluence of timing, liquidity, and luck.

We thank Amy Whitaker and Christophe Spaenjers for numerous conversations and help on this topic. We thank Arthur Kortweg for extremely helpful suggestions. We thank participants in the IFLIP Yale finance group seminar. We thank SuperRare for access to their data and information about it. We thank Will Everitt and Mingjun Sun for research assistance. We thank the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management for research support. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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William N. Goetzmann, Dong Huang, and Milad Nozari, "Non-Fungible Tokens as Investment," NBER Working Paper 34837 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34837.

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Non-Fungible Tokens as Investment

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