Just when we were getting used to the idea that the metaverses—yes, there's more than one, actually nearly a dozen and counting—are The Next Big Thing, a lightning bolt of reality hit these emerging virtual worlds and fried them.

The domino-like collapse of cryptocurrency in the wake of the biggest Ponzi swan dive since Bernie Madoff—Sam Bankman-Fried's "I don't know where the money went" Houdini act at FTX—has wiped out the value of the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that were the primary currency used to buy space (a.k.a. "land") and virtual toys on the most successful metaverse platforms like Decentraland, Sandbox and something called Bored Apes.

Blockchain-generated NFTs have lost 97% of their value in the crypto collapse—and the other 3% is on life support.

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