A recent report from Bloomberg about how one of the current hottest NFT marketplaces, LooksRare, is mostly made up of users selling tokens to themselves to earn site points went viral online. While this is far from the first time so-called wash-trading has been in the news, it's in keeping with what appears to be the beginning of a wind-down period for the NFT craze.

Meanwhile, companies continue to pour money into NFT projects, despite the fact that users are largely no longer interested.

"Obviously the enthusiasm and interest that we had at some periods last year is not here anymore," Miami-based digital art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile told the Associated Press. "I think we achieved something that wasn't sustainable."

Since its meteoric rise last year, experts have been expecting the NFT market to eventually hit a wall. OpenSea, the largest NFT platform, has seen its sales cut in half since January of this year, and the average price of an NFT dropped from $659 to $427.

Previously successful projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks have both seen a massive drop in sales.

However, some insiders say that this decline isn't a sign that the entire market is dying but rather a sign that the market is becoming more consolidated.

"Everybody was expecting that there was going to be a consolidation period," director of finance and analytics at NFT research company DappRadar Modesta Masoit told the AP. "It's not going away, it's just consolidating."

Due to the social aspect of the market, the value of NFTs can vary wildly from week to week, meaning the market could swing back into favorable territory if its popularity sees a rebound. However, that potential short-term volatility doesn't change the fact that the NFT craze seems to be shrinking in the long run: according to another report from Bloomberg, one out of every three NFT projects fail, meaning the tokens sell for less than it cost users to mint them.

While they aren't guaranteed a successful project, big businesses like YouTube (GOOGL  ), Instagram (FB  ), JP Morgan (JPM  ), and HSBC (HSBC  ) can certainly afford to take more of a chance on NFTs. The megabanks have both opened virtual NFT-based locations, and the social media platforms also have plans to integrate NFTs into their user experience.

Wash trading, on the other hand, is a growing problem in the NFT space. According to reporting from CryptoSlam, nearly 100% of the trades occurring on LooksRare constitute wash trading, trading back and forth between two wallets owned by the same person in an effort to gain rewards on the site. These rewards are offered in an effort to pull traffic away from OpenSea and onto the competitor site.