One thing I don't see addressed in this article is that as far as I know, it's basically impossible to trust the reported price or volume of NFT transactions, because there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones. So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in scams.
Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.
- Scarcity, artificial or otherwise.
- Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner. But, we can agree they have "value" of some kind.
- Lack of oversight. Governments doesn't have entire offices monitoring irregular sale prices for Obelisk the Tormentor or Mickey Mantle.
- Low transaction volume. If you're the only market-maker, you can set your own price.
These attributes lead me to believe that NFTs and trading cards would both very effective tools for someone trying to launder money.
You can take away any one of those attributes, and the asset would become much more difficult to use for money laundering. For NFTs, oversight seems inevitable in the next couple of years. One can only hope.