Does the author imply that if the interest rates fell back to 0% the NFTs would take off again? I have hard time believing that.
Notably the author misses the main effect of 0% interest rates: cheap mortgages that drive up home prices.
Low borrowing rates allow cheap speculation on NFTs. The artificial scarcity of particularly well marketed NFT "collections" means their value will appreciate. The NFT can itself be used as collateral for a loan. That new loan can be used to pay back the original loan used to buy the NFT in the first place. And since the boom is happening your NFT from the scarce and popular collection will continue appreciating in price. If you were smart and bought 10 NFTs from the exclusive collection you could pay off the original loan from the sale of, or a loan collateralized by, just one of the NFTs, giving you a net 9.
Start factoring in tax write-offs or whatever and who knows.
Now eventually this falls apart, but as long as loans are cheap people can keep this up for quite a while. It's quite amazing that someone spent half a billion dollars on even an original, "lost" da Vinci: https://luxe.digital/lifestyle/scene/most-expensive-painting...
get a loan -> buy NFT -> sell NFT cycle was sustained by 1000% rises in the NFT prices, not by the 0% interest rates of the loans.
Hence my incredulity towards the claim that 0% interest caused the NFT boom.
Lower loan rates increase the number of people who both are willing to risk taking out a loan to buy something on FOMO grounds, and who are offered the opportunity to take out a loan in the first place.
Lower loan rates also allow easy access to the money needed for wash trades and the like that allowed NFT (and cryptocurrency) market manipulation.