Noah Giansiracusa, a professor of math at Bentley University in Massachusetts and a visiting scholar at Harvard, offered an interesting post online. Using Google Trends, which shows how often people enter a given search term compared to the total search volume, he compared "NFT" and "metaverse."

Remember how so many in commercial real estate thought they were important aspects of the future? There was the attempt to create a new type of real estate asset. Apartment marketers trying to look relevant and hip. Metaverse property you could buy and maybe not actually own. The collapse of metaverse "land" values.

If you look at the five-year scale comparison of the interest over time, NFT started in a noticeable way in January 2021 and metaverse started in mid-April. The NFT search term hit peak interest, represented by an indexed popularity score of 100, in late January 2022. In comparison, metaverse only had a peak popularity that was about a quarter of the top NFT score. Neither of them disappeared from interest, but by late July 2024 they were at a relative minimum.