The coin of the crypto realm (by Axios)

Bitcoin was envisaged as a new currency — but it never took off as a unit of account, which is a core role that all currencies must play. Even if you paid for something with bitcoin, the price was generally set in dollars, with the number of bitcoins you needed to pay being reverse-engineered from that dollar-denominated price.

Why it matters: Where bitcoin failed, ethereum might have succeeded — at least when it comes to NFTs.

• On exchanges like OpenSea, NFT prices are generally denominated in ETH — to the point where the cryptocurrency looks very much like a unit of account.

By the numbers: In dollar terms, NFT prices have been on a wild ride, rising more than 12-fold between March 7 and November 25 last year, before then giving up nearly all of those gains.

• The easiest way to make sense of that volatility is to break it into two parts — a smaller rise and fall in ETH terms, compounded by a broader rise and fall in the value of ETH itself.

• In other words: Values of NFTs are denominated in ETH, which has managed what bitcoin never could, and has become a unit of account.

The bottom line: NFTs are a way to invest ETH, more than they are a way to invest dollars. Looked at that way, they're not doing quite as badly as the headline dollar numbers might suggest.