NFT as ape pics are dead, yes. But crypto as a form of value exchange for transactions where you don’t want too many eyes looking at it has not stopped since its invention in 2008. It’s just going to become a normal staple of the internet, like Bittorrent and VPNs, just existing and being used without anybody really caring too much about the technology itself. I still use it to pay for some online services where I basically just want to hand them the internet equivalent of a wad of cash without giving anyone any account details of any kind. I’ve been doing that since 2013, the NFT thing just kinda came and went and I didn’t care too much about it.

Keep in mind that buying photos isn’t the only application of NFTs. People stopped buying valueless photos, but other implementations of NFTs kept on being used.

NFTs came about due to collectable communities trying to capitalize off cryptocurrency (think baseball cards, shoes, Funko Pops, etc). NFTs were doomed from their inception because they attempt to give limitless data artificial scarcity.

Crypto is up because the SEC greenlit crypto ETFs being traded on the stock market.

That dumb reason is Tether printing new phoney-bucks.