As CryptoSlam journeys deeper into Web3, we’d like to invite our earliest supporters, as readers of NFTs On Deck, to participate in our first ever Zealy Quest. We have big plans for 2024, and in many ways, that
starts today. Our Zealy Quest will reward your participation with XP. But what is the XP for?
Stay tuned…
For the Love of the Game (Market Commentary) |
A great awakening is happening on Bitcoin, with traders
beginning to realize how early the ordinals ecosystem is. And just like Ethereum in 2021, these things can take off in an instant, turning from early to late overnight.
Let’s start off this week with some perspective on the global NFT market by looking at where we’re at in this NFT cycle. Right now, the market is up, vibes are strong, and there’s a feeling that is eerily similar to early 2021. You can see above by the red arrow where we’re at with NFT sales now, and the left circle shows early 2021. Looks kind of similar doesn’t
it? Below you’ll see where I think we’re going. Forgive the mid-graphic, but you get the point. We are early for this upcoming NFT cycle. The interesting part here is that we’re not just early for this cycle, but we’re even earlier in Bitcoin’s cycle.
Ordinals saw a massive pump this past week as traders are finally starting to wake up after seeing some hard data on the OG blockchain’s market. While many thought they had missed the action, the truth in the numbers is very clear, the Bitcoin ecosystem has barely gotten
started. Bitcoin is seeing only 3-6k unique buyers on average this year, which is a fraction of what we’re accustomed to seeing on Ethereum and Solana. Ethereum on average sees 10-15k unique buyers. And Solana sees a pretty wide range of buyers between 15-30k. With just those 3-6k daily buyers, traders have managed to drive over $100m in sales this past week on Bitcoin, pushing collections like Nodemonkes up to an average sale price of over $21k, roughly a .4 BTC floor price, and Ordinal Maxi Biz to an average sale price of $48k, nearly 1 BTC.
Most collections on Bitcoin are seeing a benefit from the newfound attention too, with the general Ordinals collection’s sales volume up over 200% in the past week. Now a perfect storm is brewing, with the early NFT cycle lining up with Bitcoin’s early cycle, and traders are making sure to not miss out. Some might call this FOMO, but I
might say there’s some wisdom in this when we have years of data to show what this market is capable of.
Consider that CryptoPunks and Bored Apes at their peak reached a nearly 9 BTC floor in 2022, and now you may understand the potential traders are seeing in ordinals. Most Bitcoin collections so far have largely found floor prices well under .25 BTC. There’s a lot of potential here. The multi-chain NFT market had a massive week thanks to all of that action on Bitcoin, but really, it was an “up only” week all around. - Global NFT sales hit a 2024 high and the highest NFT sales we’ve seen in 9 weeks with $319M.
- Unique Sellers fell 4% from the previous week, while unique buyers climbed 18% to a 1-year high.
- Average sale prices also found a 9-week high, now at $135.57.
-
Trade profits are another 9-week high, with sellers on the winning end up trades to the tune of $9M.
- February is now our 3rd straight month with over $1B in NFT sales. The last time we saw this happen was April - June 2022.
We’re now past the point of saying “we’re back”, and onto the next
phase which is simply shouting “higher!”. And that’s exactly what we’re in store for. How high we go is a great unknown, but if you ask those of us who have been here before, you’ll probably hear the same reply. We’re going higher than ever before, and like each previous run (and every future run), we’ll be saying “I told you so”.
And now… “HIGHER”. - Pandora is the king of NFTs for now, but I suspect not for much longer. The hot ERC404 collection’s sales fell 36.82% this week, and just narrowly beat out the Ordinals
collection and Nodemonkes.
- Ordinals and Nodemonkes saw a massive increase in sales this week, up 220.25% and 483.27% respectively. Traders are realizing that compared to Ethereum NFT prices in the last bull market, the early Bitcoin counterparts are still “cheap”.
- Bored Ape Yacht Club saw a return of the vibes and positive price action when Yuga Labs announced that their original founder, Greg Solano, would be returning
as their CEO. Collectors loved the news and the average sale price of Bored Apes climbed to a high of $91k on Feb 22, up from its monthly low of $53k on Feb 3.
- Persona is a perfect collection to highlight the market’s appetite for new mints. The collection in its first week saw over $6.7M in sales volume and made a hope in the
Top Ten for the first of potentially many weeks.
- Creepz by OVERLORD is benefitting from the NFT ecosystem’s current meta-token airdrops. Creepz holders will be receiving a significant amount of the $PORTAL coin
drop on Thursday, leading to a major pump in prices and sales volume.
- Froganas, Tensorians, and Mad Lads all represent Solana in the Top Ten this week. Magic Eden rewards are in effect for trading Solana collections, giving a boost to these projects when traded on their
platform.
- Ethereum sales climbed a modest 1.98% this week to $137M, and there’s a lot of
hopium that this is just the start of some major action on the chain. But how much will the new Blast L2 impact ETH NFTs? I imagine quite a lot…
- Bitcoin traders are awake, and there are starting to be many more of them. Unique buyers climbed 42.84% last week as traders are finding the opportunities to be
greater than they had once assumed.
- Solana also saw an increase in buyers last week, up 63.44% from the prior week. Last week Solana also hit a major milestone, crossing $5B in all-time
sales.
- BNB Chain saw a massive increase in sales and activity thanks to a new collection called DRIPX Miners that’s doing numbers. The token farming collection had over $3M in sales and helped push the BNB Chain to the #5 spot on the collection rankings.
- The highly anticipated Blast L2 mainnet launch is coming this Thursday, and all signs point to this being a
major liquidity-infusing event for NFTs. With $2B in locked funds that are set to be released, along with rewards, new product offerings, and platforms to farm, those thinking this will be the bull run catalyst are probably right.
- Yuga Labs has had a busy few weeks. 2 weeks ago they acquired the Proof NFT collections, and now last week, they replaced their CEO Daniel Alegre with their previous CEO, their co-founder Greg Solano.
- Magic Eden’s Ethereum marketplace goes live today, and with it, multiple collections like the Bored
Apes, DeGods, Neo Tokyo, etc making many of their collections exclusive to royalty-enforcing platforms. Magic Eden will also be giving diamond rewards to ETH NFT collections beginning on March 13.
- Scams are unfortunately a signal that the NFT market is really back, and last week we saw 2 major hacks. Both Caleb Pressley from
Barstool Sports and Adrian Wojnarowski from ESPN had their X accounts compromised and posted malicious links to a fake NBA Top Shot NFT mint.
- Walmart loved the Pudgy Penguins toys so much that they ordered more, and are finding space for them in over 1,000 additional stores. To
date, the Pudgy Penguins toys have sold over $10M worth of products.
I hope you like seeing green because it feels like we’ll be seeing a lot of that this year. The Forkast 500 NFT Index is up 2.23% in the past 7d, like last week, largely thanks to crypto prices finding 2-year highs.
The biggest threat to the market’s value is actually new
NFT mints. New mints often lead to traders needing liquidity, and if they’re not crypto-rich, they’ll be selling their NFTs to free up the funds. Luckily right now, crypto is where traders are really winning, so this lean green NFT machine should keep rolling on for a while longer. The Ethereum index is what I’ll
be focusing on this week, as a major tug-of-war is brewing between the Blast L2 platform and Magic Eden’s new Ethereum marketplace. Will Blast steal volume away from the Ethereum blockchain, or are creators right about collectors wanting to pay royalties on NFTs? I’ll keep my thoughts to myself right now, but you better believe I have some strong opinions on this to share over the next few weeks.
Be smart and keep your finger on the pulse of this
market, by keeping your eyes on CryptoSlam and the indexes. You can stay plugged in by fixing your vision on our daily NFT market updates with Inside NFTs.
Have a MEGA GM! Magic Eden Wallet Presents - Degenerate Ape Academy
Date - Feb 27 Blockchain - Solana Price - Free RedruM
- Seven
Date - Feb 27
Blockchain - Ethereum Price - 0.1 ETH
Emi Kusano - Melancholic Magical Maiden
Date - Feb 28 Blockchain - Ethereum Price - Dutch Auction ElmonX - The Scream, 1985
Date - March 1
Blockchain - Ethereum
Price - 0.075 ETH
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer - Stargate 1994
Date - March 2
Blockchain - ImmutableX
Price -
$35 |
PVP is short verse player vs player and is commonly used in the video game world. This week it became a talking point in the trading markets when a battle of traders' skills took place on the Blur marketplace and ended with one trader taking 800 ETH from another trader’s bot. Now with PVP having a more abstract
meaning, it’s worth your time diving in to find all of its potential use cases.
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