Hong Kong actor and singer Alex Fong says his losses on non-fungible tokens outweighed anything he ever lost trading stocks — a confession that arrives as Blur, once Ethereum's largest NFT marketplace, prepares to shut down.

Celebrity buyers and hidden losses

Fong, 46, said his NFT investments went so badly that he hid the scale of the losses from his wife, artist Ye Xuan, who asked about them almost daily. According to the original report, he said the NFT losses exceeded anything he had suffered in the stock market, and he warned fans not to copy him, blaming a fixation on getting rich overnight.

Fong first came to prominence as a competitive swimmer before moving into Hong Kong's entertainment industry in 2001. He married Ye Xuan in February 2025, and the couple announced the birth of a daughter that December.

Hong Kong's celebrity-driven NFT boom

Fong's story sits within a wider boom-and-bust cycle that swept through Hong Kong's entertainment circles. In September 2021, Christie's held its first NFT auction in Asia, “No Time Like Present,” built around the collection of Hong Kong actor Shawn Yue. The online sale brought in HKD 121.6 million ($15.6 million) and featured rare CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens, and Meebits.

A year later, on January 1, 2022, Jay Chou's PhantaBear collection launched and 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, while sales of Edison Chen's Heart Project jumped more than 20,000% as celebrities rushed in.

The reversal came just as quickly. 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.

Were the profits ever real?

A March 2026 study from the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), written by economists William Goetzmann, Dong Huang, and Milad Nozari, suggests many NFT profits were never real. Looking only at items that were resold, the researchers found that SuperRare prices appeared to grow about 490 times by October 2021, yet just 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. On that basis, the economists estimate SuperRare's actual peak was only about 10% of the reported figure, and that it came in March 2021 — seven months earlier than the headline numbers suggested.

Why Blur is shutting down

Blur, which once handled over 70% of all Ethereum NFT trades, announced on October 12 that it will close its website on November 12. It built that lead by courting professional traders with token incentives and zero trading fees, pushing past OpenSea in Ethereum NFT volume. The company also said it would stop offering new loans on its Blend lending service, a peer-to-peer facility that let buyers purchase NFTs with borrowed funds. As Cryptopolitan reported, 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%. The BLUR token 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.

Blur's retreat is part of a broader industry contraction. 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. Attention now turns to whether the contraction stops with Blur or continues through the platforms that remain.