Explore the astonishing increase of the NFT market in the first quarter of 2023, contradicting earlier conceptions of its extinction, and examine the fundamental drivers fueling this recovery and the top NFT collections by trading volume.
The general statistics of the NFT market showed a significant gain in Q1 2023 compared to Q4 2022, reinforcing the power of a sector that, up until a few months earlier, had been written off as dead.
Let’s examine the primary factors that contributed to this increase and the NFT collections with the biggest volume.
Market data show that NFT volumes are strongly increasing
The non-fungible token market is thriving more than ever, as evidenced by the fact that in Q1 2023, NFT sales volumes were higher than they were in Q4 2022.
ETH and USD volumes increased. In the first three months of 2023, sales of little under 11.5 million NFTs totaled 2,839,354 ETH, or $4.54 billion, compared to 1,525,471 ETH in the final months of 2022.
The number of users increased from 11.23 million in Q4 to 14 million in Q1, indicating that both the collections and the market are growing in popularity.
This growth appears to be due to Blur, NFT’s professional trader platform, which has attracted cryptocurrency interest.
In this aspect, OpenSea’s absolute dominance as the sector’s leading platform ended in 2023 when Blur, with its nimble dashboards and massive data for each marketplace collection, took over.
Currently, the two markets compete for the majority of sales volume in the NFT industry.
However, there was a slight decline in April, and it appears that the downward trend has persisted into the first few days of May, despite the optimistic Q2 2023 estimate.
In the coming months, it will be interesting to watch if interest can reach or surpass this Q1 2023 level, and if Opensea in particular can reclaim some of the market share that Blur has taken from them.
The acceptance of NFTs on Bitcoin, made possible by the rise of Ordinals, will also be an intriguing development to watch. If they do, they may’steal’ part of the volumes currently flowing on Ethereum and other compatible EVM chains.
Which NFT collections sell the most merchandise?
After a brief introduction of the NFT market, let’s look at the collections with the highest sales volumes by week, month, and all-time. CryptoSlam provides full info.
Azuki, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and DMarket had the top 3 collections with the largest volume during the previous seven days.
While the final one is a part of the Mythos chain, the first two are on the Ethereum blockchain.
A total volume of $31.3 million was produced by the 3 collections.
The same collections from the previous 30 days are on the podium, but in different places.
In actuality, the DMarket collection is in second place with $34.1 million in sales, followed by Bored Ape Yacht Club in third place with $46.47 million, and Azuki in fourth place with $29.6 million.
Blocklords Banners, part of the ImmutableX network, and Mad Lads, a Solana collection, are notable.
Last but not least, when we look at the historical values (over all time), Ethereum reinforces its position as the top blockchain for NFT creation, with virtually all of the top 10 collections implemented and traded on this network.
Axie Infinity, a Ronin chain collection, with $4.24 billion in sales.
The next two goods, the popular Crypto Punks collection ($2.17 billion) and Bored Ape ($2.82 billion), show the public’s short- and long-term interest.
Names like Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Art Blocks, Otherdeed, NBA Top Shot, Azuki, CloneX, and Moonbirds are among the last seven collections in the top 10.
These names have collectively sold goods worth $17.36 billion. A year ago, Crypto Punk #5822, which sold for $23.2 million, was the NFT with the largest sales volume.
Ordinals and non-fungible tokens on Bitcoin are currently popular
It is quite fascinating to examine the current trend, which is Ordinals and inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain, in addition to the volume of NFT sales data.
Since the Bitcoin network, unlike all other contemporary blockchains, does not enable smart contracts, it is not possible to create fungible tokens and NFTs on it.
However, the Satoshi, the smallest unit of Bitcoin, can now be used to produce digital artifacts thanks to the Ordinals protocol, which was developed by Casey Rodarmor, a Bitcoin Core engineer.
In recent days, the movement appears to have blossomed, with thousands of people building fungible BRC-20 tokens and NFTs on top of Bitcoin.
Since February 2023, when word of the trend spread, more over 4.5 million non-fungible token registrations have occurred, with expectations for growth.
Ordinaries inscriptions cost more to access the blockchain, even to transfer BTC between wallets, hence many users despise them. Despite increasing Bitcoin network utility.
Binance suspended BTC withdrawals (and all other withdrawals, including FIAT withdrawals) on Sunday, May 7, due to heavy network congestion and hundreds of thousands of transactions in the mempool waiting to be confirmed and added to a blockchain.
Evaluating the potential impact of this trend on Bitcoin’s blockchain architecture and future applications necessitates considering user concerns.
Off-chain processing can reduce Layer 1’s workload by temporarily moving to the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin community standard.
A “single layer” solution for all web3 transactions sounds dismal for Bitcoin and Ethereum, as the future will see marketplaces differentiated by security, transparency, and decentralization.
An interoperable platform that could easily manage even beginner users who are currently unable to handle the complexity of blockchain and automatically manage any cross-chain action through a single solution would be great.
