After becoming popular and then fading away, will Labubu have the same ending as NFT?

Labubu, a fictional IP character created by Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung in 2015, gained global fame through Pop Mart's blind boxes and celebrity endorsements, including BLACKPINK's Lisa and Rihanna.
Its market value skyrocketed, with a rare mint-colored Labubu selling for 1.08 million yuan at auction, boosting Pop Mart's stock price significantly.
The hype around Labubu draws parallels to NFTs, as both rely on scarcity, FOMO (fear of missing out), and social media virality for their popularity.
However, like NFTs and other Pop Mart IPs (e.g., MOLLY and SKULLPANDA), Labubu may face a price correction after the initial hype, as seen with past trendy collectibles.
While Labubu's scarcity is artificially controlled, NFTs have inherent technical scarcity, raising questions about Labubu's long-term value sustainability.
Historical trends suggest most hyped collectibles eventually cool down, with only Bitcoin (BTC) so far defying this pattern.

Author: Blockchain Knight

Labubu is a fictional IP character created by Hong Kong artist Long Jiasheng in 2015, belonging to the "THE MONSTERS" series of Pop Mart. Its design combines the dark elf elements of Nordic mythology with oriental aesthetics to form a unique "ugly and cute" style, subverting the sweet paradigm of traditional toys.

Initially circulated as a niche picture book character, it quickly rose from the art circle to become a global phenomenon-level trendy toy IP after launching blind boxes in collaboration with Pop Mart in 2019.

In April 2024, BLACKPINK member Lisa posted a photo of the Labubu doll on social media, calling it "my baby", which triggered a buying spree in Southeast Asia and a 7-fold premium in the Thai market.

Later, celebrities such as Rihanna and Beckham's daughter hung Labubu on Hermès bags, promoting its upgrading from a toy to a "luxury accessory", thus opening a new "road to hype", triggering global pursuit, and its market price was also driven up several times.

On June 10, the world's only first-generation mint-colored Labubu was unveiled at the Yongle 2025 Spring Auction, with a hammer price of 1.08 million yuan, pushing Pop Mart's stock price to a record high, causing its stock price to increase nearly 10 times in a year, and its founder became the richest man in Henan.

This situation inevitably reminds me of another product that was also popular all over the world a few years ago - NFT. It was also led by the celebrity effect, also topped the world at auctions, and was also hyped by the whole nation, except that one is a physical asset and the other is a virtual asset.

With in-depth analysis, we can also see that the spiritual cores of the two seem to be full of similarities. For example, both of them stimulate consumers' "fear of missing out (FOMO)" by creating scarcity; for example, both of them rely on social media fission, Labubu users show hidden models on Xiaohongshu or TikTok, and NFT players set their collections as social media avatars, all of which are full of strong social attributes.

So the question is, will the two have similar endings? From experiencing hot market speculation to eventually returning to calm, or even ushering in a mess after the hype bubble period, after all, the NFT avatars that were worth millions back then have now lost 90% of their value.

Before that, we can take a quick look at the development of Pop Mart’s other classic IPs. MOLLY, as Pop Mart’s first hit IP (born in 2006), created scarcity through cross-border cooperation with luxury goods and trendy brands. Some joint models have a unit price of over 10,000 yuan, and the scalper market has a 300% premium. However, the popularity cycle of the new series has been shortened to 6-12 months, and the prices of some styles have been halved compared to their peak.

Another IP called SKULLPANDA saw its resale price drop by 40% in half a year due to a surge in supply.

We currently do not have data to compare the price fluctuations of all IPs released by Pop Mart, but some highly representative IPs have generally returned to calm after experiencing market hype, and their prices have also experienced a significant pullback, which is almost the same as NFT.

Currently in the second-hand market, the original price of LABUBU is 599 yuan but has been hyped up to nearly 15,000 yuan. This inevitably reminds people of another popular toy Bearbrick more than ten years ago. At that time, the Chanel co-branded model was sold at a high price of 220,000 yuan. However, the current price of most models is only 30%-50% of the original price. So can Labubu escape such a fate?

Perhaps past history has already told us the answer. After all, no matter how brilliant a narrative is, it will be shattered one day. Currently, it seems that only BTC has not broken this curse.

What’s more, the scarcity of Labubu is only shaped by the official description. You must know that NFT naturally has absolute scarcity, which cannot be broken technically and cannot be intervened by humans. From this perspective, NFT+Labubu seems to be more interesting, but this is another story.