Notes from a quieter market.

The UK art NFT market of 2026 is not the carnival of 2021. Secondary liquidity is thinner. A great many tokens from those years are now orphans: the front-end gone, the discord quiet, the image still sitting on a server if you are lucky. What remains, if you care about art, is almost a relief. People who are still here tend to want a work, not a costume.

The unglamorous UK rules

HMRC’s published position is that cryptoassets are treated as property. A disposal — a sale, a swap, sometimes a spend — can be a chargeable event for capital gains. Keeping records is not optional if you want to sleep. Pounds in, pounds out, dates, wallet addresses, what you actually bought. The Financial Conduct Authority does not, in the ordinary case, regulate a digital artwork token as if it were a share. Do not confuse that gap with safety. It means you have fewer rails to grab if a platform behaves badly.

VAT on digital services can apply when you buy from abroad, depending on the facts. Artist resale right does not automatically map onto every on-chain sale. None of this is a reason to avoid the work. It is a reason to stop pretending the work lives in a jurisdiction called the internet.

A thin market is a bad place to look for a story about yourself. It is a decent place to look at art.

Ethereum, Tezos, and snobbery

Ethereum still carries most of the money and most of the theatre. Tezos still carries a disproportionate amount of careful, small-edition work by artists who would rather not spend a week’s rent on a failed mint. That is a cultural fact, not a yield strategy. We do not publish a league table of chains. We do note, when we visit, which bus the artist actually takes.

What we actually watch

We watch primary sales by artists we would visit. We watch whether a contract is readable. We watch whether a gallery that talks about digital work also gives it a dark room. We do not watch floor-price accounts, and we do not publish them. If you came here for a signal, you will leave hungry. That is the service.

For the collector’s version of this argument — wallets, seed phrases, looking before listing — read the guide. For the craft argument, read the essay. For a room, leave the house.