A Wall Street Journal article has claimed that non-fungible token (NFT) sales are “in decline”in the same week that the top five grossers alone accounted for more than $1 billion in primary and secondary sales.
The article cited data from the NFT Nonfungible market analysis platform suggesting that the number of NFT sales has fallen 92% from an all-time high in September 2021.. Active wallets on the Ethereum NFT market were also said to be down 88% from a high in November 2021.
“The NFT market is collapsing,” the article concludes.
However, on-chain data from Dune Analytics suggests that NFT Market Remains Robust; data shows NFT users and transactions much higher than Nonfungible reports.
Analyzes also show that Ethereum NFT US Dollar Daily Volume for the Week One of the Highest Seen Since February; the popular OpenSea marketplace saw nearly $550 million in volume on Sunday alone.
Analysis from Tom Schmidt, a partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital, shows a similar story when he focuses on OpenSea transactions and USD volume..
eat on, man pic.twitter.com/CTJFldAHNk
— Tom Schmidt (@tomhschmidt) May 3, 2022
Come on man pic.twitter.com/CTJFldAHNk
Sub-sectors within the NFT market are emerging, and while some areas of the oversaturated market are in decline, others are seeing big gains.
The analytics platform Nansen, which indexes NFT collections by type, shows that “Blue Chip” NFTs -established and highly regarded brands such as Bored and Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Azuki tokens- are far outperforming art or gaming tokens.
The Nansen Blue Chip-10 Index, which tracks the top 10 NFT projects, is up 81% year-to-datewhile the indices following the top art and gaming NFT collections are down 39% and 49% respectively so far this year.
This phenomenon of consolidation of the NFT market capital in the main collections was pointed out in an analysis by NFTstatistics.ethwhich shared a chart in late April showing that the top five collections are driving the Ethereum NFT market.
This trend continues: BAYC, Azuki, CloneX, Doodles & now Moonbirds separating themselves from everyone else.
I’ve talked about large-caps outperforming, but it’s really the top-5 projects driving all the gains. pic.twitter.com/UsUlwHMJ9M
— NFTstatistics.eth (@punk9059) April 26, 2022
This trend continues: BAYC, Azuki, CloneX, Doodles and now Moonbirds separate themselves from everyone else. I’ve talked about the big values outperforming the others, but it’s really the top 5 projects that drive all the gains. pic.twitter.com/UsUlwHMJ9M
“There’s clearly a trend right now where five or six of the most successful projects are sharply outperforming, while the rest are flat on the downside.”pseudonymous market analyst NFTstatistics.eth told Cointelegraph.
Nonfungible data shows a spike on Sunday: the number of sales and active wallets that day reached numbers not seen in their data since November 8, 2021directly correlated to Otherside’s (and Ethereum) record-breaking metaverse land sale by Yuga Labs again contradicting the claim that NFT sales are “flattened.”
It is not clear why the Nonfungible data that the WSJ relied on is misaligned with the Dune data.. However, it could be due to Nonfungible’s inclusion of the sales volume of the “play-to-earn” (P2E) game Axie Infinity.
Volume for the popular play-to-earn game hit an all-time high of over $40 million on November 4, 2021, before gradually declining to its current levels of around $500,000according to data from CryptoSlam.
But the collapse in popularity of a P2E game, as NFTstatistics.eth put it, “is an extremely different message than ‘NFTs are collapsing'”.
@DJohnson_CPA suggests that AxieInfinity was so big it dominated numbers in November and has since collapsed. It seems possible.
From where I sit, this is an extremely different message from “NFTs are collapsing”https://t.co/lq66GbhbAj
— NFTstatistics.eth (@punk9059) May 3, 2022
@DJohnson_CPA suggests that AxieInfinity was so big that it dominated the numbers in November and has since collapsed. It seems possible. From my point of view, this is a very different message than “NFTs are crashing” https://t.co/lq66GbhbAj
While the current debate focuses on Ethereum NFTs, Solana is fast becoming a popular blockchain for these types of assets and is the second largest blockchain behind Ethereum for NFT sales volume..
In the past week, Solana’s NFT project “Okay Bears” topped OpenSea’s 24-hour sales tracker for the first time and is fourth behind Mutant Ape Yacht Club in seven-day sales volume on CryptoSlam with over $47 million transacted.
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