Originally published in Svenska Dagbladet by Björn Jeffery, October 5, 2025
Vanja Wikström took her trail of followers through life — and led them into her own project World of Alidia. Blaming ignorance and good intentions when many have lost their money sounds, to say the least, naive.
It was a strange time on the internet, that spring of 2021. American artist Beeple auctioned off a digital artwork through Christie’s. Final price: over 69 million dollars. The artwork was a so-called NFT — a digital image with a certificate of ownership — and nothing more than that. The following year, pop star Justin Bieber bought an NFT depicting a bored ape for over a million dollars.
Pop culture had found it. But somewhere around here it turns. The downhill slope begins. And it is precisely at that moment that influencer Vanja Wikström chooses to enter the market with her own project World of Alidia. Rather than showing caution in the face of a young and unstable market, she drags her followers down into the fall with her.
Let us call the plans generously ambitious and high-flying.
But the pair — Wikström and her partner Niklas Malmqvist — do offer a partial explanation in the podcast. This is how Niklas Malmqvist describes the situation: “There was a euphoria in the entire NFT industry, you should know. It was something everyone got caught up in. And we’ve realised that we absolutely got caught up in it too.”
Euphoria is rarely a signal that indicates it is a good idea to put either time or money into something. Nor is it an accurate picture of how the NFT market looked or functioned at that point in time.
Like all creator platforms on the internet, success was concentrated in an extraordinarily small number of projects and individuals, while the vast majority had to make do with the scraps. Compare with YouTube, which has around 69 million video creators. Only one of them is Mr Beast — the man with the most YouTube subscribers in the world, at a full 442 million.
Describing it as euphoria is therefore extremely generous. The NFT market was always going to reward very few, and those few were almost certainly not going to be a Swedish influencer and her partner launching a project as the market was already collapsing.
In June 2022, just before the project launched, the volume of NFT transactions on the major platforms had fallen sharply. The market was more or less stone dead — but World of Alidia continued regardless.
Why did they continue, despite this headwind? The account of what happened differs depending on who you ask. But one plausible explanation is, as always, to follow the money. More than a third of the money that came into World of Alidia went to the pair’s own salaries. The office space and the ME researcher they had promised never materialised. What remains now is a collection of worthless digital images that Wikström’s followers paid good money for.
But the situation raises larger questions about the influencer economy. In the feeds of social media we are now accustomed to “paid partnerships” and other euphemisms for advertising. That is how the business model works. The method for doing it is a kind of fictitious authenticity. It must look genuine to feel credible, even if most people probably know deep down that what they are seeing is advertising.
Is it all just theatre? Is there no responsibility for what influencers try to sell? Can you say anything at all as long as you have some form of discreet advertising label?
Wikström and Malmqvist’s explanations for the failure make it sound as though good intentions are enough, and not much more than that. It sounds, to say the least, naive.
An influencer is never bigger than their followers. The trust that may have taken several years to build can be erased in a very short time.
Unfortunately, the market does not appear to be entirely self-regulating yet.
While influencer Vanja Wikström appears to want to put World of Alidia behind her, she leaves behind followers who lost everything they invested. They probably will not forget World of Alidia quite so easily.
