Yes. Wash trading for the masses is the biggest innovation of NFTs. It is bananas how many breathless articles were typed and published about how today's crazy kids were buying stoner monkey pictures for $$$ without even a mention of this.
With Bitcoin or Eth or Doge or whatever, it's hard to paint the tape. You can't move the ticker by selling BTC to yourself at a high price, because your offer to buy it at that price will be rudely filled by somebody else selling their BTC, leaving you holding the bag. Since all BTC is presumed to be equally good you cannot selectively buy only from yourself. The exception to this is of course when you operate an exchange in which case you can fake whatever trading you like.
But with NFTs you don't need to be an exchange operator. Wash trading for everyone! Only YOU hold Bored Ape #1337, only YOU can sell it, so you can safely trade it back and forth between two, three, or a dozen of your own accounts all day giving it the appearance of value while losing only transaction fees. You'll never have your buy offer matched with another seller of Ape #1337 since you have the only one.
All NFT sales should be assumed wash trades without evidence to the contrary.
This argument is valid word for word for art, domain names, houses... So I guess you should be willing to follow your logic to the same conclusion in those cases too.
Houses have price history, but usually the identity of the owners is a matter of record and if I sold my house to myself, you could see that. I could try to obfuscate this by creating a shell company to buy my own house but that is about 1,000x more work than creating another ETH wallet and still not very anonymous.
More importantly, even if I manage to create the appearance that my house has a price history of eight million dollars, somebody looking at the physical property will note that it is in a crappy neighborhood, the vinyl siding is cracked, the deck is rotting, and the construction is generally cheap '80s on a quarter acre. There are other ways to estimate the value of the property besides looking at what it last sold for. So we rarely ever see this attempted in real estate.
This is true of domain names too. I am not going to trick anybody into thinking 643626bcaqw.org is worth as much as tesla.com for obvious reasons, no matter what wash trades I perform. Pointing to "well it last sold between two anonymous owners for millions!" fools nobody. The price history of a domain name is not even normally shown when you try to purchase one, just the current asking price.
Art is closer, which makes sense as NFTs are supposed to be a digital equivalent to art. I am not in the market for high priced art and certainly wouldn't recommend it as an investment. Unlike a house, I can't inspect a piece of art and judge how much money it might be worth. Like an NFT, I imagine when a piece of art is sold at auction it's typical for the auctioneer to mention it last sold to so-and-so at such-and-such price. The difference is that "so-and-so" might be, say, Jeff Bezos or the Metropolitan Museum of Art or something. No auctioneer is going to say "well, this piece is highly valuable because it last sold from D6EB90 to CBB0FE at 24.190 WETH"[1]. Nobody would care about a purported sale between two anonymous parties.
The NFT world is the only space I can think of where that data is assumed to be meaningful. Notice how the prominent the price history graph is on OpenSea -- it's almost as big as the image itself. Probably because there is no other way to guess at a valuation for a Bored Ape, so even though this anonymous price history is highly dubious, it's all a prospective buyer has to go on.
To the above comment, we don’t actually know people are buying and selling these. It is also entirely possible these transactions are fraudulent (i.e. buy your own stuff to give an impression of demand).
I mean, I'm sure I will be dismissed since it's just my word and nothing else. But yes, people are buying and selling these, just not at the insane volumes as peak mania 2 years ago.
It's easy to dismiss these sales as wash trades, and I'm sure at least some of them are, but most of them are not. The NFT space has dwindled down largely to a a group of enthusiasts that like gamifying NFT mechanics, generative artists and generative collectors (no I'm not talking about monkey pics), as well as some people who managed to make a bunch of money during the bull market and not lose it all and they continue to refine their holdings expecting a future crypto bull market.
Institutions like the big auction houses and a few galleries still facilitate NFT sales as a few NFT artists and generative artists have been able to successfully bridge into the art world.
I agree though that on a long enough time line, 99% of NFTs will absolutely become worthless if they aren't already. This is true of many types of collectibles. Ultimately this is a good thing, but I'm certain that there will be a community of dedicated creators and collectors that remain as long as the government doesn't squash crypto completely.