Sep 12, 2022

Summary

After a brutal cryptocurrency summer, let us take a look at where NFTs stand now. CryptoSlam shows 188,300 buyers spent $110 M on NFTs over the past 7 days. This meant, NFT sales down a bit (- 1.8%) compared to last week. Two of the most noticeable trends were the emergence of Ethereum Naming Service (ENS) as the leader based on highest 7-Day Trading volume on OpenSea and the emergence of Solana based NFTs and Marketplaces like MagicEden.

Leaders

• Solana NFT marketplace doubled (+116%)

• Otherdeeds rocketed (+81%)

• NBA TopShot made it to the Top-10 with +40%

• Flow sales up by +25%

• Crypto fan token sales up 0.5%, with $2B in sales

• ENS made it to the TOP of the OpenSea on a 7-Day Trading Volume ($3.6M +113%)

Laggards

• BAYC sales tanked (-42%)

• CryptoPunks was down by -26%

• Moonbirds was down by -66% and dropped out of TOP-10

• Ethereum and Polygon sales are down -22% and -19%, respectively

Highest-selling NFT projects:

• y00ts mint t00b: $7.5M (new drop)

• Otherdeed: $6.4M (+81%)

• Sorare: $6.1M (+9%)

• Bored Ape Yacht Club: $6M (- 42%)

• Ethereum Name Service: $3.6M (+113%)

Key Trends: and rise of Solana

• Crypto Domain Names
  ENS is top on OpenSea, in terms of 7-day trading vol, beating BAYC, CloneX, and Moonbirds.

  • To date, over 2.2 M ENS names have been created amongst 546K unique users.

  • Last 7 days, ENS had 2,565 ETH ($4 M) trading volume on OpenSea. ENS was followed by:

    • BAYC’s 1,934 ETH ($3 M)

    • Otherdeed 1,767 ETH ($2.8 M)

    • CLONE X’s 1,353 ETH ($2.1 M)

    Rather than use long hex strings (i.e. “0x0CCfA1c…”)  for addresses Web3 DNS providers enable users with human-readable names e.g. “abc.eth” or “xyz.crypto”

    DNS providers have integrated with leading wallets, exchanges and dApps including Metamask, Rainbow, Brave, Opera, Trust, 1inch, Moonpay etc.

• Rise of Solana
  Solana-based NFT marketplaces e.g. Magic Eden and Metaplex reached $115 M on Sept. 6. Magic Eden, a Solana-based NFT marketplace has increased its market share of the overall NFT market to 36.6% as of Sept. 7 within a week.

  Lower costs to mint and trade has been the biggest drivers. Note: Magic Eden charges no fee to mint but only 2% in trading fees.
  “y00ts mint t00b” collection had $9.6 million in secondary sales in September.

Source: Block Research

Weekly Trading Volume by Chain for last 3 Months from CryptoSlam.

Detailed Analytics

• According to DappRadar, here are the Top-10 NFT Collections for the last 30 days (Aug 11 - Sep 10, 2022) by Trading Volume. This provides overall standing.

• According to analytics site Lunar Crash, ENS is 3rd in Market Cap and fourth in Social Dominance and mentions. This adds Social engagement of the NFTs.

• ENS Dashboard is a tracker by developer Nick Johnson, shows that over last days (Aug 10- Sep 10, 2022) there were 392K registrations and 38K Renewals.

Some hot purchases:

• July 2022, “000.eth” was bought at 300 Ether (ETH), which was worth around $320,000 at the time of sale

• “Samsung.eth” and “Starbucks.eth” were sold for 60 ETH (~$90K)

• Some anonymous buyer placed a bid of $1 M for the ENS Domain “Amazon.eth”

Price Action

ENS has outperformed ETH over the past 3 months by more than 40%.

ENS - Price Action available HERE

The token is down -81% from ATH (all time high) and +108% from ATL (All time Low)

Conclusion

Few weeks back I wrote about Rental NFTs and the NFT usage evolution from vanity to utility. There are distinct signs of that migration. The first signal is, in spite of BAYC tanking (imho a Profile Picture vanity use case), the OtherDeeds (presents a potential utility use case with land) has surged. But a much more compelling use case is The Web3 Domain name. A surge in trading volume of Web3 domain names (something which many, many users can use and also at a much more affordable price) is a strong indication of an up and coming migration to real life and practical NFT utilities.

A key building block to this migration has to be lower cost of minting and trading. The rise of the Solana based NFT ecosystem is a key testimony towards that. The cheaper it gets, more utility demand will follow and vice versa!

Sources:  Forbes ,  CryptoSlam.io,  CoinGecko,   BoardRoom, Cointelegraph, DappRadar