Asset Pricing Models for NFTs: A Framework
February 20, 2023 | Kristof Lommers, Jack Kim
The market for non-fungible token (NFTs) has been one of the most rapidly growing crypto segments. The NFT market has reached almost 25 billion USD in sales volume in 2021 from less than 100 million USD in 2020. Despite this backdrop and numerous organizations that focus on NFT pricing services, there has been limited – publicly available – research on asset pricing frameworks. Transparency on how these assets should be priced is important for all involved stakeholders and for efficient markets to develop. With this article we hope to provide more transparency and put forward a framework about how to conceptually think about NFT pricing and implement asset pricing models. NFTs present a relatively difficult pricing problem and there are various idiosyncrasies to the NFT market that have to be taken into account. The numerous difficulties in the data exercise include the unique nature of NFTs, limited data availability due to the relative illiquidity, high dimensionality of features relative to the available data, and the volatile non-stationary nature of NFT prices. Given these data issues appropriate considerations would need to be taken into account to create sufficiently unbiased estimates.