In this month of April, the NFT market is in sharp decline, yet the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection continues to dominate on the Crypto.com marketplace.
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is by far one of the most successful NFT collections ever. It was launched in April 2021, and the parent company issuing the collection, Yuga Labs, was estimated to be worth $4 billion in early 2022.
For instance, on Crypto.com’s NFT marketplace it has long since dominated unchallenged, though it is being closely followed by Azuki and Otherdeed for Otherside.
To date, the total traded volume of BAYC’s NFT on Crypto.com has been nearly $2 billion, with $114 million traded in the past 30 days alone.
However, its monthly trading volume turns out to be down 14% from the previous 30 days, with Otherdeed for Otherside down 25% but Azuki up 8%. However, Azuki’s growth stopped in the last week.
The NFT market
The thing is that as a whole, the entire NFT market is in decline in April.
The most worrisome figure seems to be the one posted a few days ago on Twitter, which shows that the number of unique daily buyers/sellers of NFTs during April plummeted overall from more than 20,000 at the beginning of April to 5,000 by mid-month.
20,000 was already a very small number, but 5,000 is very small indeed, not least because that is the daily sum of all the major marketplaces.
The most conspicuous decline was on what until very recently was the most used marketplace, OpenSea, now overtaken by Blur on which however the number of daily unique buyers/sellers appears to be declining.
It should be noted that from the beginning of the year until the beginning of March this daily number had consistently turned out to be well above 20,000, but by March it had already fallen below this threshold, only to recover slightly in early April.
It is also clear from the graph 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 clearly emerges 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, and leaving out the Pro version, whilst in February the monthly trading volume was over $600 million, in March it dropped 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 that of November 2022, which was the worst month of 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 might seem worrisome only when compared to the period when the bubble inflated, because for now it is absolutely in line with the pre-bubble period.
The annual lows
The numbers for April 2023 for the NFT market are the lowest for the year, and for the past 12 months.
Most metrics, such as sales, volume, and unique users, are at annual lows, while some have fallen even to 2021 levels.
The total number of daily sales fell below 10,000, while daily unique users fell just above 4,000.
In particular, the daily trading volume of NFTs fell below 6,000 ETH, which is a volume that the Blur platform alone had in December 2022.
6,000 ETH corresponds to about $11 million, which is only a tiny fraction of, for example, the $7 billion in daily trading on Binance.
In other words, right now the NFT market as a whole has less than one thousandth 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 rebound, with +7.7% from the previous week, however. Of particular note is that the number of buyers is up 41%, suggesting that the mid-April spike was a negative peak now behind us.
Bored Ape Yacht Club turned out to be the best performing NFT collection ever, not just on the Crypto.com marketplace, with an overall sales increase of 64% over the past seven days.
So on the one hand, mid-April was the low point in the decline that began in early March, while on the other hand, in the last seven days the NFT market has recovered slightly.
Thus, the overall situation does not seem critical at all, but simply greatly scaled down from the 2021/2022 bubble.
