Non-fungible token artworks: More crypto than art?

•We study whether the market for NFTs crypto art is informationally efficient.•We also analyze if crypto art shares common features with real-world art.•We find that crypto art market is informationally inefficient, with autoregressive patterns.•Crypto art is unrelated to real-world art as its price is primarily driven by cryptocurrency.•Crypto art represents a haven for traders to store crypto money. Non-Fungible Tokens (NTFs) artworks attract relevant trading volume in the secondary market. Their prices, primarily denominated in Ethereum cryptocurrency, recently experienced a substantial increase. In this paper, we first investigate whether the market for crypto art is informationally efficient and, secondly, if crypto art can be considered as an alternative to real-world art rather than a haven for crypto-money speculative traders. We find evidence of market inefficiency with long-lasting autoregressive patterns in price discovery. As for the nature of crypto art as an asset class, our findings support the idea that crypto art is unrelated to real-world art. Crypto art prices are mostly determined by gains in the cryptocurrency of denomination, whereas real-world art is mostly unrelated to the financial markets. We conclude that crypto art is far from being another medium to express artistic content and is currently just a storing unit for crypto-money, in absence of relevant alternatives.