NFT broke all records in the third quarter as well

Non-fungible tokens have had a successful third quarter. Here you can find out more about the extent of the hype.

The wave of hype about non-fungible tokens (NFT) just doesn’t want to break. In the spring it seemed as if the euphoria surrounding non-fungible tokens had subsided, NFT are now more popular than ever. DappRadar figured the market cap of the NFT market, plus NBA topshot, at $ 14.19 billion. The size for the NFT market fluctuates depending on the source, because not all purchases are recorded on the blockchain. But most sizes are in the billions.

The blockchain game Axie Infinity is a particularly good example of the hype and success surrounding NFT. Because the game recorded more than $ 2 billion in trading volume for the first time.

As can be seen from the graphic above, NFT only spanned a shadowy existence in the crypto market a few years ago. Few knew what to do with the term NFT. In line with this, the trading volume in Q3 2020 was still a modest 28 million US dollars. Today, in the third quarter of 2021, things look very different: In the course of just one year, sales of NFT works of art have shot up by over 38,000 percent. And from the second quarter of 2021 through the third, the trading volume increased by a whole 9.4 billion US dollars.

NFT sales on OpenSea

The platform has become the largest and most important trading place for non-fungible tokens OpenSea established. The third quarter represents OpenSea the most successful in its company’s history. In August alone, the trading platform for digital art generated sales of 3.4 billion US dollars. Then in September there was a slight decline to a trading volume of 3 billion US dollars. However, that is still an impressively high sum. In comparison to this, Christie’s, one of the most traditional auction houses in the world, has “only” 5.5 billion US dollars for the whole of 2020 implemented.

The increase in sales of OpenSea from July (326 million US dollars) to August (3.4 billion US dollars) alone corresponds to an increase of 943 percent. What’s even more impressive is that OpenSea only turned over $ 8 million in January 2021.

Google Trends

A look at Google Trends can also provide interesting insights into the developments in the NFT market. Ultimately, the search volume on Google can also be viewed as an indicator that shows how high the demand for NFT was and is. The blue line represents the search term “NFT”. Red was selected for comparison and represents the search volume of ETH. It can be seen that NFT were almost unasked before February 14th. After that, however, there was an increased number of searches. On October 6th, the search terms ETH and NFT are almost on par.

CryptoPunks

The so-called CryptoPunks are symbolic of the rise and hype surrounding NFT. The “punks” limited to 10,000 copies are now traded for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of US dollars. And according to CoinMarketCap, the CryptoPunks represent the most valuable NFT collection in the world. The following graphic shows the price of a CryptoPunks over the last 90 days. The average price of a punk on July 9th was 17.23 ethers (today 58,182.6 US dollars). In comparison, the price on October 6 is already 159.5 ethers, an average of 536,027.9 US dollars (at an ether price of 3,376.82 US dollars).

Nonfungible.com

The Nonfungible.com site provides information on all aspects of NFT. In the graphic below shown are the number of NFT units sold in the last 30 days. On January 1st, 30-day sales were 80,000 units. In the third quarter in particular, more NFTs were sold than ever before.

The following graphic shows the total amount of US dollars spent on NFT purchases. It is also clear here that in the third quarter of 2021 more US dollars were spent on NFT than in any other quarter before.

The number of active wallets was also at a record level on October 5th. As of January 1, there were still 18,000 active wallets that contained non-fungible tokens. On October 5th, the total of active wallets was already 155,000. Which corresponds to an increase of 761 percent. Here, too, it can be clearly seen: from August 2021, the number of active wallets has increased noticeably.

NFT less expensive than expected

Even if CryptoPunks give the impression that everything in the NFT market is utopian expensive, comes Reuters came to a different conclusion. Because, as the following graphic shows, the majority of non-fungible tokens can be purchased at a price of 0 to 10,000 US dollars. Millions of expensive CryptoPunks or the 69 million US dollar artwork by Beeple are more the exception than the norm.

Above all, it should be noted that NFTs have never been as popular as they were in the third quarter of 2021. It remains to be seen whether this is just a short-term hype. Or whether the NFT market can really be valued at $ 1 trillion.