Hong Kong actor and singer Alex Fong says he lost more money on NFTs than he ever did trading stocks.
The former Olympic swimmer made the revelation as Blur, a company that was once Ethereum’s largest NFT marketplace, has announced that it will be shutting down.
Alex Fong joins other Hong Kong buyers in losing money on NFTs
A 46-year-old Hong Kong actor and singer named Alex Fong has said that his NFT investments went so badly that he hid the scale of the losses from his wife, who asked about it almost daily.
Fong was initially a competitive swimmer, but he moved into Hong Kong’s entertainment industry in 2001 and married artist Ye Xuan in February 2025. The couple announced the birth of a daughter that December.
Fong says the losses on his NFTs were above anything he had lost in the stock market and warned fans not to copy him, blaming a fixation on getting rich overnight.
In September 2021, Christie’s held its first NFT auction in Asia, “No Time Like Present,” built around Hong Kong actor Shawn Yue’s collection. The online sale brought in HKD 121.6 million ($15.6 million) and featured rare CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens, and Meebits.
When Jay Chou’s PhantaBear collection launched a year later on January 1, 2022, all 10,000 tokens sold out in 40 minutes at 0.26 ETH each (about $1,000). Within days, it overtook Bored Ape Yacht Club. Meanwhile, sales of Edison Chen’s Heart Project jumped more than 20,000% as celebrities rushed in.
However, by June 2022, PhantaBear’s floor price had dropped 96.6% from its peak to about 0.65 ETH (roughly US$730), below its launch price. NFTs tied to Chen and Yue also fell below their debut prices once the hype faded.
A March 2026 CEPR study written by Economists William Goetzmann, Dong Huang, and Milad Nozari suggests that many NFT profits were never real. They looked at items that were resold and found that SuperRare prices seemed to grow about 490 times by October 2021, but only 6.2% of SuperRare NFTs were ever sold a second time.
Owners also tended to sell their winners and keep their losers, skewing the data. Due to that, the economists estimate SuperRare’s actual peak was only about 10% of the reported figure, and it happened in March 2021, seven months earlier than the numbers suggested.
Why is Blur shutting down?
Blur, which once handled over 70% of all Ethereum NFT trades, said on October 12 that it will close its website on November 12. The company also said that it would stop offering new loans on its Blend lending service. The marketplace’s smart contracts will stay live on Ethereum, and BLUR holders will keep control of the fee switch.
Blur’s monthly volume declined from about $1.43 billion in March 2022 to under $7 million three years later, a fall of more than 99.5%. BLUR dropped more than 20% after the announcement, to around US$0.015. The move follows the October 2 shutdown of Blast, another project from Blur founder Tieshun Roquerre.
Aside from Blur, Cryptopolitan reported that Binance ended NFT trading on July 3, 2026. Nifty Gateway closed in April and Magic Eden scaled down its operations to focus on Solana. OpenSea, Tensor, Rarible and SuperRare are still running their NFT businesses.
If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.