NFT
In the first quarter of 2023, overall NFT market metrics have surged compared to the fourth quarter of 2022, consolidating the strength of an industry that was reported dead until just a few months ago.
Let’s take a look at what were the main drivers of this growth and which NFT collections had the highest volumes.
All details below.
Market stats: NFT volumes are growing strongly
In the first quarter of 2023, we saw an increase in NFT sales volumes compared to the fourth quarter of 2022, confirming that the non-fungible token market is more vibrant than ever.
Show the data an increase in both ETH and USD volumes: Specifically, in the last months of 2022, there were sales of more than 9 million NFTs, equivalent to 1,525,471 ETH or approximately $1.97 billionwhile in the first three months of 2023, revenue was just under 11.5 million with a volume of 2,839,354 ETH or $4.54 billion.
The number of users also increased 11.23 million in Q4 to 14 million in Q1which indicates not only that the collections are more popular, but also that the public interest in this market has increased.
The main reason for this growth appears to be the launch of Blur, NFT’s marketplace for professional traders, which has attracted involvement from the crypto community.
In that sense, it heralded the beginning of 2023 the end of OpenSeas undisputed hegemony as the leading platform in the industry, in favor of the newly formed Blur, which was more popular both for its user-friendly dashboards and rich data available for each marketplace collection.
Currently, the two marketplaces compete for the majority of the NFT sector’s sales volume.
There, however was a short dip in April and the downward trend seems to continue in the first days of May, although the forecast for Q2 2023 is positive.
It remains to be seen whether interest will match or exceed Q1 2023 levels in the coming months and whether Opensea in particular will be able to regain some of the market share lost to Blur.
It will also be interesting to see whether NFTs on Bitcoin, enabled by the rise of Ordinals, become mainstream and “steal” some of the volumes currently flowing on Ethereum and other compatible EVM chains.
Which NFT collections have the highest sales volumes?
After this brief overview of the NFT market, let’s analyze which collections have the highest sales volumes by distinguishing 3 precise moments: the last 7 days, the last month and the all-time data. All data comes from the CryptoSlam platform.
With respect to the past 7 days, the top 3 collections with the highest volume were Azuki, Bored Ape Yacht Club and DMarket.
The first two belong to the Ethereum blockchain, while the last one belongs to the Mythos chain.
In total, the 3 collections generated a total volume of $31.3 million.
For the past 30 days, the same collections are on stage, but in different positions.
In fact, Bored Ape Yacht Club ranks first with $46.47 million in salesfollowed by the DMarket collection with $34.1 million and finally Azuki with $29.6 million.
Also notable is the entry of Mad Lads, a collection developed at Solana, in the top 5, while Banners of Blocklordspart of the ImmutableX network, appeared in the top 10.
Finally, when we look at the historical values (always), we see how Ethereum establishes itself as the leading blockchain for the development of NFTsas almost all of the top 10 collections of all time have been deployed and sold on this network.
Notably, the only non-Ethereum collection and the one with the most sales is Axie Infinity, developed on the Ronin chain, with a volume of $4.24 billion.
Next comes Bored Ape, which confirms public interest in both the short and long term with $2.82 billion in revenue, and the highly popular Crypto Punks collection of $2.17 billion.
The last 7 collections in the top 10 include names such as Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Art Blocks, Otherdeed, NBA Top Shot, Azuki, CloneX and Moonbirds.
Together, these names have sold in total $17.36 billion. The best selling NFT was Crypto Punk #5822, which sold for $23.2 million a year ago.
Trend of the moment: Ordinals and non-fungible tokens on Bitcoin
In addition to the volume of NFT sales data, it is very interesting to analyze the trend of the moment, namely ordinal numbers and inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
As most people know, the Bitcoin network does not support smart contracts like all modern blockchains it is impossible to issue fungible tokens and NFTs on it.
However, Ordinals, a protocol invented by Bitcoin Core developer Casey Rodarmor, has made it possible to create digital artifacts from Bitcoin’s smallest units, the Satoshi.
The trend seems to have exploded in recent days, with thousands of people creating NFTs and fungible BRC-20 tokens on top of Bitcoin.
Just in terms of non-fungible tokens, there have been over 4.5 million registrations since February 2023, when news of the trend started to spread, with forecasts for growth in the coming months.
While this represents a huge step forward for the usefulness of the Bitcoin network, the Ordinaries inscriptions don’t seem to be appreciated by many users, who are forced to pay more than usual to use the blockchain, if only to transfer BTC. to carry from one wallet to another.
In this regard, on Sunday, May 7, Binance was forced to temporarily suspend BTC withdrawals (all other withdrawals remained open, including FIAT withdrawals) due to very heavy network congestion and the hundreds of thousands of transactions tied up in the mempool waiting to be confirmed and added to a blockchain.
So while this trend appears to be a game changer for Bitcoin’s blockchain architecture and prospects for future use, it must be weighed against the difficulties encountered by the user.
Perhaps a solution would be to temporarily move to the Lightning Network, which has now become an institution for the Bitcoin community, and reduce the amount of work which Layer 1 is forced through processing off chain calculations.
Unfortunately, one “a layer” solution for all web3 transactions seems disappointing for both Bitcoin and Ethereum, as the future moves towards a differentiation of the areas in which each tier must compete, based on its own level of security, transparency, and decentralization.
It would be nice to see in the future an interoperable platform able to manage any kind of automatically cross-chain operation via a unified solution, easy to use and suitable even for novice users, who are unfortunately not able to handle the complexity of the blockchain world at the moment.