Table of Contents
⚡ Quick Summary
Most people who made NFTs in 2022 lost money. Gas fees were brutal, the market peaked in January and crashed 97% by September, and 80+ million listings meant almost no organic discovery for new creators. Unless you had an existing audience and capital to absorb the costs, a simple digital product would have outperformed any NFT collection — without the speculation, the fees, or the crash.🎯 Key Takeaways
- ✔Ethereum gas fees in 2022 could cost $50u2013$500+ per transaction u2014 always calculate your worst-case cost before minting anything
- ✔OpenSea had over 80 million NFTs listed by mid-2022; without an existing audience, discovery is nearly impossible for new creators
- ✔NFT trading volume dropped 97% from January to September 2022 u2014 the market rewarded early movers, not followers
- ✔The Terra/Luna collapse in May 2022 was the inflection point that triggered the broader NFT market decline
- ✔A digital product (course, template, service) on Gumroad or Teachable offers more predictable ROI than an NFT drop for most creators
- ✔NFT ownership does not automatically transfer copyright u2014 a legal risk most creators overlook entirely
- ✔If you don't have an audience before you launch an NFT project, you are building the plane while falling
🔍 In-Depth Guide
The Gas Fee Problem Nobody Warned You About
The single biggest reason I told clients to stay out of NFTs in 2022 was the cost structure. Most YouTube tutorials glossed over Ethereum gas fees u2014 the transaction costs paid to the network every time you mint, list, or transfer an NFT. In January 2022, average gas fees were around $50u2013$100. During peak congestion, they spiked past $500 for a single transaction. If you minted a 10-piece collection on Ethereum, you could easily spend $500u2013$1,000 before making a single sale. Alternatives like Solana and Polygon had lower fees, but far less buyer traffic. The math simply didn't work for most independent creators. A digital artist selling prints for $30 each had no business model here. Even with Lazy Minting options on OpenSea u2014 where the buyer pays gas instead of the creator u2014 the friction was real and it killed conversion. I've seen talented designers in Dubai abandon projects mid-launch because the economics collapsed the moment they ran the actual numbers. Before touching any NFT platform, calculate your worst-case scenario: zero sales, full gas costs. If that number hurts, stop there.Market Saturation and the Discovery Problem
Here's a number that should have stopped most people cold: OpenSea had 80+ million NFTs listed by mid-2022. Rarible, Magic Eden, LooksRare u2014 add those in and the supply was essentially infinite. Demand was not. The buyers who drove prices up in 2021 were a relatively small pool of crypto-wealthy speculators. By Q1 2022, those same buyers were already rotating out, chasing the next thing. For a new creator with no existing audience, getting discovered was nearly impossible without paying for promotion. I worked with a client who had genuinely beautiful generative art u2014 1,000 pieces, well-designed, good rarity distribution. She spent three months building it, AED 4,000 minting and promoting it on Twitter, and sold 11 pieces. The project isn't bad. The timing and the platform economics were. The lesson I hammer in my courses: distribution always beats quality in a crowded market. If you don't have an audience before you launch, you're building the plane while falling.What You Should Have Done Instead in 2022
The same energy people poured into NFT projects in 2022 would have compounded much faster in other directions. I told this to every client who asked. If you're a creator, a Gumroad or Teachable product at $49u2013$197 with an email list of 2,000 people outperforms a speculative NFT drop almost every time u2014 with zero gas fees and no dependency on crypto market sentiment. If you're in real estate marketing, which I teach to agents across the UAE, using AI tools to build listing automation and lead generation systems was producing measurable ROI within 30 days. GoHighLevel alone was transforming how agents followed up with leads u2014 that's where I was spending my time and recommending clients spend theirs. The honest truth: NFTs in 2022 required you to already be famous, already have capital, or get incredibly lucky. Building a skill-based digital business u2014 even a small course, a consulting offer, an automated service u2014 gives you something NFTs never could: recurring, controllable income. Start there. The blockchain will still be there when you're ready.💡 Recommended Resources
📚 Article Summary
Everyone was making NFTs in 2022. My inbox was full of messages from clients in Dubai asking me how to mint their first collection. My answer surprised them: don’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever — at least not the way most people were approaching it.The NFT market in early 2022 looked like a gold rush. Bored Apes were selling for millions. Influencers were dropping collections overnight. But I’d seen this pattern before with dropshipping, with crypto in 2017, with every ‘easy money’ wave that rolls through. The people who got rich were early. The people who followed the hype? Most of them lost money, time, and credibility.Here’s what nobody was talking about: the cost to actually make and sell an NFT was brutal. Ethereum gas fees in 2022 were running $50–$300 per transaction on bad days. If your NFT didn’t sell, you’d already spent hundreds just minting it. I watched a client in Dubai spend AED 2,000 on gas fees for a collection that generated exactly zero sales. That’s not an investment. That’s a lesson.The deeper problem was market saturation. OpenSea alone had over 80 million NFTs listed by mid-2022. Standing out required either a massive existing audience or serious marketing spend — neither of which most creators had. The NFT space had become a winner-takes-most market almost overnight, and the winners were already winning before most people showed up.What I tell my students now is the same thing I told those clients then: the technology isn’t the problem. Blockchain-based ownership is a genuinely interesting idea. The problem was timing, execution, and who was actually buying. In 2022, most buyers were speculators hoping to flip — not collectors who valued your work. When speculation dried up after the Terra/Luna collapse in May 2022, the whole market followed. Floor prices dropped 70–90% across most collections within months.If you’re a creator, educator, or business owner, there were better ways to monetize digital work in 2022 — and there still are. I’ll walk through exactly why NFTs were the wrong bet for most people, and what you should have been doing instead.
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Sawan Kumar
I'm Sawan Kumar — I started my journey as a Chartered Accountant and evolved into a Techpreneur, Coach, and creator of the MADE EASY™ Framework.
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