Despite a broad rally that has pushed digital asset prices to levels not seen in years, the NFT market remains stubbornly in a bear.
In the past week, large caps like Bitcoin have risen as much as 22%, from $28,000 to a peak of $35,000 on Monday. Bitcoin, in turn, dragged much of the sector higher, with only two assets – Huobi’s HT and Trust Wallet’s TWT – in the top 100 by market cap in the red on a seven-day basis, according to CoinGecko.
However, despite the broad rally, the NFT sector has largely failed to rise.
According to data from Nansen, floor prices – the lowest price at which a single NFT can be purchased for a given collection – for major projects like CryptoPunks and Pudgy Penguins have fallen on a seven-day basis, by 4% and 5% respectively.
The Nansen NFT-500 index continues to decline and currently stands at 308, down from a yearly high of 1,700 in October.
On October 24, both the total number of buyer addresses (7,200) and the number of first-time buyers (920) reached an annual low.
However, there are some figures that look promising for the sector.
Overall trading volumes appear to have bottomed out. For the week ending October 9, volumes on mainnet Ethereum hit a yearly low of 29,742 ETH, or less than $50 million. Since then, volume has begun to rise, with 47,369 ETH worth of NFTs worth more than $85 million traded or minted in the week ending October 23.
In addition, there has been an increase in the number of ‘active projects’: collections whose turnover exceeds benchmarks such as 10, 100 and 1,000 ETH. On October 8, active projects reached a low of 41 collections, compared to 80 currently.