Despite market decline, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection remains the most popular on the Crypto.com marketplace, with over $2 billion in total trading volume and $114 million traded in the last 30 days.
The NFT market is seeing a steep decrease in April, but the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection is still the most popular on the Crypto.com marketplace.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection is unquestionably one of the best NFT projects ever. Yuga Labs, the collection’s parent company, was valued at $4 billion in 2022 when it was released in April 2021.
For instance, it has long since ruled unopposed on the NFT marketplace of Crypto.com, albeit Azuki and Otherdeed for Otherside are closely trailing it.
On Crypto.com, BAYC’s NFT has seen approximately $2 billion in total trading volume to date, with $114 million changing hands just in the last 30 days.
Even so, Otherdeed for Otherside’s monthly trade volume is down 14% from the prior 30 days, while Azuki is up 8%. Azuki’s growth, though, has slowed somewhat recently.
The NFT industry
The problem is that in April, the entire NFT market is seeing a drop.
The most alarming statistic was posted on Twitter a few days ago: in April, the number of unique daily NFT buyers/sellers dropped from more than 20,000 to 5,000.
Even while 20,000 was already a very small number, 5,000 is even smaller, not the least of which is the fact that it represents the daily average of all the major markets.
OpenSea, which had recently been displaced by Blur as the most popular marketplace, saw the biggest drop in daily unique buyers/sellers.
From January through March, this daily number remained above 20,000. It dipped below this mark by March, but rose somewhat in early April.
The graph also shows that despite the introduction of OpenSea Pro, the number of daily unique buyers/sellers on OpenSea has decreased, although Blur has not lost many customers compared to the beginning of the year.
Additionally, it becomes very evident that Blur, OpenSea, and OpenSea Pro are the trade-wise dominant marketplaces in this market, with all other markets playing a minor part.
Data from OpenSea
Taking a closer look at OpenSea in particular, and excluding the Pro version, the monthly trade volume has fallen from over $600 million in February to just $240 million so far in April. In March, it was over $600 million.
It’s important to note that the current level is comparable to November 2022, the worst month of the previous bear market for the cryptocurrency industry.
The valuations right now are also not significantly lower than they were prior to the beginning of the speculative bubble in the NFT markets, which burst between August 2021 and May 2022.
As a result, the current situation is entirely consistent with the pre-bubble era and may only appear worrying when compared to the time when the bubble inflated.
The yearly lows
The NFT market’s April 2023 statistics are the lowest of the year and the previous 12 months.
Most measures, including revenue, volume, and unique users, have reached annual lows, and some have even dipped below levels from 2021.
Daily unique users hardly rose above 4,000, but the sum of all sales dropped below 10,000.
The daily trading volume of NFTs in particular dropped below 6,000 ETH, which was the volume that the Blur platform alone had in December 2022.
In comparison to, say, the $7 billion in daily trade on Binance, 6,000 ETH is equivalent to only roughly $11 million.
To put it another way, the NFT market as a whole currently has a turnover that is less than one thousandth that of the cryptocurrency spot markets.
It is important to remember that the NFT market was around 20 times larger at its peak, or in January 2022, at the height of the bubble, and that it is still much smaller than the spot market for cryptocurrencies.
For NFT’s final week, BAYC dominates on Crypto.com
However, there has been a slight recovery over the last week (+7.7% from the prior week). Particularly noteworthy is the 41% increase in buyers, which suggests that the mid-April rise was a negative high that has already passed.
With an aggregate sales gain of 64% over the previous seven days, Bored Ape Yacht Club turned out to be the best-performing NFT collection ever, not just on the Crypto.com marketplace.
Therefore, while the NFT market has modestly rebounded over the past seven days, on the one hand, mid-April was the low point in the fall that started in early March.
As a result, the overall situation does not appear to be catastrophic at all, just significantly less dire than the bubble of 2021–2022.
