The global NFT market has witnessed a downward trend in trading volumes, marking a consistent decline for the third week of January.
According to the latest figures from CryptoSlam.io, a prominent on-chain data aggregator, trading sales volume in the NFT sector fell to $223 million over the past week. This represents a significant decrease of 22.5% compared to last week’s figures.
In contrast, the NFT market has seen an increase in the number of active participants. Recent data shows that over 734,000 collectors made NFT purchases across various platforms in the past week. This increase, which amounts to a 34% increase, indicates growing interest in non-fungible tokes, despite the overall decline in trading volume.
NFT monthly sales volume across major blockchains | Source: CryptoSlam.io
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However, laundry sales were noticeably high, especially in the Solana and Avalanche collections. Wash trading is a form of market manipulation where an investor simultaneously sells and buys the same NFT to create misleading, artificial activity in the market. The remarkably high levels of wash trading on Solana and Avalanche suggest that a significant portion of their NFT transactions may be artificial, potentially inflating observed market activity and distorting real economic indicators.
The Bitcoin Ordinals collections were hit the hardest in January, when sales fell by almost 35%. Ethereum and Solana-based NFTs also saw significant declines. However, non-fungible tokens on Polygon saw a massive 70% increase in sales this month. Polygon’s most popular collection, Trump Digital Trading Cards Series 2, saw a notable 25% increase in bottom price. This may be due to the hype surrounding the current US election season and Trump’s campaign.
Weekly bottom price movement of the TRUMP2 collection | Source: CoinGecko
On the other hand, the popular Ethereum-based collections have seen a notable decline in recent weeks, with the floor price of CryptoPunks and BAYC both falling by almost 8% in the past two weeks.
Although the market recovered significantly from the long-term downtrend in the fourth quarter of 2023, it appears to be entering a bearish phase again, perhaps indicating that user interest is shifting to the less popular networks – such as Polygon and Avalanche-based collections – both of which have seen remarkable growth this year. It appears that NFT activity is shifting and diversifying this month, rather than strictly shrinking.
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