Day-Trading Army Goes All-In on NFTs as Meme-Stock Mania Ebbs

Bankrupt car-rental firms and Bitcoin-to-the-moon bets are falling out of fashion, as the retail army plunges into the digital art world like never before.

Thanks to collectibles like Pudgy Penguins and the Bored Ape Yacht Club going viral on social media, sales of non-fungible tokens on the largest marketplace, OpenSea, jumped to $3 billion in August. That’s more than 10 times the tally in the prior month, and the exchange is now routinely the no. 1 user of computing power on the Ethereum network.

Day traders are going all-in on computer-generated avatars, leaving rival speculative trades like mainstream cryptocurrencies ...