Are Cardano NFTs doing better than Ethereum, Solana, Polygon?

Back in September 2021, the Alonzo upgrade opened the doors to smart contracts on Cardano. At the time, the community was quite excited about NFTs being introduced on the platform. During the first few days, people tried to test the rollout. However, it failed to gain much traction as users still relied on other blockchains such as Ethereum, Solana and Polygon to trade their jpeg collectibles.

Nevertheless, Cardano is currently in a much better position. Although the aforementioned networks retain the top positions along with ImmutableX and BNB Chain, Cardano has managed to rise above Arbitrum, Flow, Ronin, Avalanche, Fantom, Algorand, Cronos and Tezos by determining more volume via sales in the past 30 days.

While the gap between the numbers of Ethereum, Solana and Polygon appeared to be quite large for Cardano at press time, it was only a few million of BNB Chain’s number. The same is tabulated below.

Also read: Ethereum or Polygon: Which is preferred for Web3, Blockchain Gaming?

On Cardano, the number of buyers has fallen by around 17% in the last month. In fact, on a quarter-over-quarter basis as well, the number has fallen from 2.8k to 2.1k. The number of sellers, on the other hand, has risen from 86 to 123. According to a recent Messari report,

“Daily NFT transactions were down 27% QoQ, and daily unique buyers were down 23%. The decline in activity was not only due to fewer unique buyers, but also fewer average transactions per buyer. Daily unique sellers, on the other hand, increased by 43%.”

The big picture

ImmutableX has given Cardano neck-to-neck competition. Messari’s report elaborates on the aforementioned dispute and the latest Q1 flip, highlighting,

“In the fourth quarter of 2022, Cardano was the fifth largest network by NFT secondary sales volume with $40.5 million. On some days, Cardano generated more secondary sales than Immutable X, which ended Q4 as the fourth largest network by secondary sales volume with $56.7 million However, Cardano’s secondary sales volume fell 18.6% to $35.8 million in the first quarter, and Immutable X pulled away, rising 18.7% to $66.3 million.

During the same period, the average secondary sale price of Cardano was $85.84, much higher than that of competing NFT networks such as Flow [$17.65] and WAX [$2.62]. Due to the previously highlighted difference in average sales price, Cardano is ahead of chains such as Flow and WAX in sales volume rankings, despite lagging behind on the total transaction, unique buyer, and unique seller fronts. Despite the drop in buyers and increase in sellers, there is a silver lining. Messari highlighted the same, pointed out

“The number of unique buyers greatly exceeds the number of unique sellers despite the recent increase in unique sellers. A relatively small number of sellers continue to sell to a larger number of buyers, which may indicate that more new users are entering the market.”