NFT sales volume decline, despite massive uptick in ‘unique’ buyers. Here’s why

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), is all over the news is all over the news lately. It has been stirring interest and curiosity, as well as creating a lot of anxiety at the same time. The potential of it is limitless, and threatening to disrupt and unlock a new world economy that people couldn’t believe to-have-existed. Or is it just another case of hype and hoax?

Well, take a look here.

As observed in the chart above, the NFT market witnessed a significant hike since its inception. The number of daily unique buyers saw

a hike surpassing the 60k count as of 3 November, 2021. However, the corresponding daily sales volumes of NFTs have been decreasing since the start of September 2021.

Nevertheless, the uptick mentioned above offset the decline or in other words, reduction in the overall sales volume hasn’t affected the market negatively.

Possible reasons?

The report noted,

“This reduction in volume is in part due to the cool-off we’ve seen across even the biggest NFT collections on secondary markets. Some of which have experienced substantial decreases in sales volumes and trading activity over the past couple of months.”

Another reason could be the lower averaging ticket prices as fewer crypto-native buyers entered the market.

Nonetheless, sales of NFTs of different valuations on different platforms. The highest daily average sales price had a ‘dispersed’ conclusion. Consider the graph below.

SuperRare and OpenSea dominate the high-end NFTs space, i.e. OpenSea and SuperRare accounted for the bulk of daily average NFT sale prices in the $30k-60k range. Although, the latter stood out. It surpassed $100k+ on six occasions in daily average sale price of NFTs.

“This suggests SuperRare has found favor among higher-end NFT collectors, as compared to the more “degen” retail NFT flippers on OpenSea.”

But, OpenSea is by far the most popular NFT marketplace, perhaps partly helped by the many retail NFT sellers on the platform. It holds around 97.8% of the total trading volume

among all NFT marketplaces. YES! you heard it right.

Moving on, the report also shed light on the networks dominating NFT volumes as well. Take a look at the insights provided below.

Ethereum and Ronin led the line-up. Ethereum crossed $100 million in daily NFT volume in late August and early September. At press time, it fell shy of the mentioned mark. The latter falls just short of Ethereum’s volumes, having been boosted by Axie’s releases in Q2 and Q3 of 2021. Next up, Wax Network witnessed a surge, as sales volumes have spiked since the start of October.

Now, NFTs have boomed – there’s no denying this fact. No wonder, different crypto exchange platforms are jumping on this bandwagon. Just recently, the Huobi Group was the latest addition to the NFT craze.

However, there’s always a caveat. Given that the NFTs space is relatively recent, it is likely that many more players will enter the market. This surely will attract strict regulations.