NFT: BAYC dominates on Crypto.com

by James · April 24, 2023

In this month of April, the NFT market is in sharp decline, but the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection continues to dominate the Crypto.com market.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is arguably one of the most successful NFT gatherings ever. Launched in April 2021, the collection’s parent company, Yuga Labs, was estimated to be worth $4 billion in early 2022.

For example, in Crypto.com’s NFT marketplace it has long dominated unchallenged, although it is closely followed by Azuki and Otherdeed for Otherside.

To date, the total traded volume of BAYC’s NFTs on Crypto.com has been nearly $2 billion, with $114 million traded in the last 30 days alone.

However, its monthly trading volume is found to be down 14% from the previous 30 days, with Otherdeed for Otherside down 25%, while Azuki is up 8%. However, Azuki’s growth stopped in the last week.

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The NFT market

The fact is that, as a whole, the entire NFT market is in decline in April.

The most worrying figure appears to be the one posted a few days ago on Twitter, showing that the number of unique daily buyers/sellers of NFTs during April plunged overall from more than 20,000 in early April to 5,000 in the middle of the month.

20,000 was already a very small number, but 5,000 is very small, not least because it is the daily sum of all the major marketplaces.

The most noticeable decline was on what until very recently was the most used marketplace, OpenSea, now overtaken by Blur, where the number of daily unique buyers/sellers appears to be dropping.

It should be noted that from the beginning of the year to the beginning of March, this daily number had consistently been found to be well above 20,000, but by March it had already fallen below this threshold, only to recover slightly in early April.

The graph also shows that Blur has not lost many users compared to the beginning of the year, while the number of daily unique buyers/sellers on OpenSea has plummeted, despite the launch of OpenSea Pro.

It also becomes clear that this market is literally dominated by Blur, OpenSea and OpenSea Pro, with all other marketplaces playing a marginal role, trade-wise.

OpenSea’s data

Looking specifically at OpenSea, leaving out the Pro version, while in February the monthly trading volume was over $600 million, in March it fell to $380 million, and so far in April it has barely reached $240 million.

It is worth noting that the current level is in line with November 2022, which was the worst month in the last bear market for the crypto sector.

Moreover, the current values are not much lower than those before the start of the speculative bubble in the NFT markets, which inflated between August 2021 and May 2022.

So the current situation may seem worrisome only compared to the period when the bubble inflated, because for now it is certainly in line with the pre-bubble period.

The annual declines

The figures for April 2023 for the NFT market are the lowest for the year, and the last 12 months.

Most metrics, such as sales, volume and unique users, are at annual lows, while some have even fallen to 2021 levels.

The total number of daily sales fell below 10,000, while daily unique users fell in excess of 4,000.

Notably, the daily trading volume for NFTs fell below 6,000 ETH, which is a volume that the Blur platform alone had in December 2022.

6,000 ETH is equivalent to about $11 million, which is just a tiny fraction of, say, $7 billion in daily trading on Binance.

In other words, right now the NFT market as a whole has less than a thousandth of the turnover of the cryptocurrency spot markets.

It is worth noting that at its peak, i.e. in January 2022 at the height of the bubble, the size of the NFT market was about 20 times what it is now, i.e. still far smaller than the cryptocurrency spot market.

The last week for NFT: BAYC dominates on Crypto.com

Over the past seven days, there has been a small recovery, with +7.7% from last week. Of particular note is that the number of buyers is up 41%, suggesting that the peak in mid-April was a negative peak now behind us.

Bored Ape Yacht Club proved to be the best NFT collection ever, not only on the Crypto.com market, with a total sales increase of 64% in the last seven days.

So, on the one hand, mid-April was the low point of the decline that began in early March, while on the other hand, the NFT market has recovered a bit over the past seven days.

Thus, the overall situation does not seem critical at all, but simply greatly scaled down from the 2021/2022 bubble.