An article published by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) claims that the NFT market is “collapsing” but data shows that the market is flourishing better than ever.
In the same week when the five major amassments alone generated more than $1 billion in primary and secondary sales, a Wall Street Journal story stated that the sales of NFTs are “flatlining”.
An NFT market analysis platform, Nonfungible claims the number of NFT sales has dropped down by 92 percent after reaching an all-time high in September 2021. The data also claims that wallets engaging in the Ethereum (ETH) NFT market have descended by 88 percent. Moreover, the publishers gave out a judgement saying that “The NFT market is collapsing”.
Nevertheless, Dune Analytics’ dashboard on chain data shows that the NFT market is still flourishing. The article’s statistics specify that NFT users and transactions are significantly more than what Nonfungible has claimed.
Additionally, the data presents that the volume per day in USD on Ethereum NFTs has been among the highest recorded since February with standard market OpenSea seeing nearly $550 million in quantity on May 1 alone.
A partner at venture capital company Dragonfly Capital, Tom Schmidt gave out his analysis and thoughts on the matter via twitter.
Some areas of the NFT market are plummeting while some are growing exponentially.
Blockchain analytics platform which monitors NFT collections by category, Nansen, indicates that “Blue Chip” NFTs —famous and expensive manufacturers such as the Bored and Mutant Ape Yacht Membership and Azuki tokens — are surpassing artwork and gaming tokens by a huge margin.
The Nansen Blue Chip-10 Index, which tracks the top 10 NFT projects, has increased by 81% year to date (YTD), whereas in comparison, the indexes which monitored the highest artwork and gaming NFT collections have stepped down 39% and 49% respectively.
It’s uncertain why Nonfungible’s data shown by the WSJ is different from Dune’s, maybe it could be due to Nonfungible’s incorporation of sales numbers from P2E game Axie Infinity.
According to CryptoSlam’s data, volume for the popular play-to-earn reached an all-time high of over $40 million in November 2021, before gradually declining to under $500,000 today. However, NFT statistics show a decline in the demand of a P2E game.
It is safe to say that NFT market is not collapsing because just recently, a Solana NFT project Okay Bears topped OpenSea’s 24-hour sales tracking for the first time and is currently fourth in 7-day sales volume on CryptoSlam, right behind the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, with over $47 million worth of transactions.
