Welcome to the second quarterly report from the Big Blockchain Game List.  An outworking of 18 months of data collection, our goal is to combine such data with other sources, adding high-quality analysis to provide insights into what’s happening in the blockchain gaming sector. 

Additionally, much of this data is displayed and manually updated with reasonable frequency at the Everything Blockchain Gaming sheet. You can also receive ongoing daily analysis of the sector via the GamesTX Substack.

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• Q2 saw the reversal of many of the positive trends experienced in Q1.
• All of the top gaming tokens experienced a price decline in Q2.
• Only five of the 42 gaming tokens launched in 2024 rose in value.
• Total value of investments dropped 9% to $296 million.
• Pixels experienced a 69% fall in DAUWs with the launch of its chapter 2 update. 
• Guild of Guardians and Hunters On-Chain launched on Immutable zkEVM.
• The total number of tracked games on the Big Blockchain Game List rose to 994. 

By almost every metric, Q2 2024 was a difficult quarter for the blockchain game sector.

The price of all major gaming tokens declined. Only four tokens – RON, SUPER, MYTH and YGG – ended the quarter in positive territory for 2024 year-to-date.

Similarly, of the 42 gaming tokens that launched in 2024, only five – YAKU, UDS, BLS, PIRATE and MAVIA – were up compared to their first tracked price. The average performance of these 42 tokens by the end of June 2024 was a decline of 41%.

Except for the number of deals tracked, investment into the sector was also weak. During Q2 2024, there were 77 new deals, bringing the H1 2024 total to 153, up 128% compared to the previous six months.

However, the combined value of these investments declined, with a total of $296 million announced for Q2, compared to $324 million for Q1 2024. The half year total of $620 million was down 5% compared to H2 2023.

One reason was the majority of deals were token pre-sales, attracting small crypto-only funds and retail investors. As the quarter continued, the lacklustre performance of 2024-launched tokens deflated sentiment, further reducing the ability of projects to raise funding.

Even well-established projects experienced this softness, with the largest single announcement in Q2 being The Sandbox’s $20 million convertible note. In contrast, its last public funding announcement was a $93 million raise at a $500 million valuation in November 2021. The convertible note has a $1 billion valuation cap; a small multiple given everything that has occurred over the past two and a half years.

Yet there were signs of progress. The sector continues to expand in terms of newly announced titles. The Big Blockchain Game List added 157 new titles and discontinued 104, resulting in an all-time high total of 994 tracked games.

Immutable remains the single largest blockchain in terms of publicly announced projects and its newly-launched Immutable zkEVM blockchain was a bright spot in terms of increasing activity. It surpassed four million active accounts on a cumulative basis, with daily peaks of over 350,000 active wallets.

Q2 2024 also saw the launch of Immutable’s Guild of Guardians mobile RPG, which was downloaded from app stores over 600,000 times, gaining 250,000 active players and a peak of 15,000 DAUWs. The most popular onchain game on Immutable zkEVM was Boomland’s Hunters On-Chain, which launched its play-to-airdrop campaign, attracting around 60,000 active wallets.

However, the trajectory of the most popular blockchain game Pixels was a warning not to take raw data at face value. Following an all-time-high of one million daily active unique wallets in May, its chapter 2 update in June reset the game’s reward mechanics, which also had the impact of breaking bot accounts. Pixels’ daily activity dropped to around 250,000 DAUWs.

Despite this, and the declining value of its PIXEL token, Pixels remained the most popular blockchain game in terms of daily activity.

Check out the full report here or the pdf here.

NFT18 has published its annual report for 2023 regarding the performance and key metrics of the NFT market.

GM

Our 2023 NFT Market Report is live, get your free or pro copy here : https://t.co/3ry9UCzmDa

What will you learn in this report?

2023 has been a year of massive decrease for NFT markets. Despite the bear market and massive losses, community remained active and more… pic.twitter.com/rqCOP3uxcV

— NFT18 (@nft18_reporting) February 1, 2024

This is a long report that analyzes many aspects related to the NFT market, and in particular its performance during the past year. 

The report on the NFT market in 2023

The report highlights how 2023 has been a year of significant decline for the NFT markets, but despite the bear market and massive losses, the community has remained active.

In particular, despite a 62% reduction in the overall volume of trades compared to 2022, which dropped to 10 billion dollars, the number of active wallets has only decreased by 10% compared to 2022. In other words, over the years, there have still been a significant 2 million active addresses. 

These are effectively the results of the burst of the speculative bubble of 2021/2022, with a further 67% drop in the average price of individual NFTs.

The total loss of value was 1 billion dollars, concentrated on the NFTs of the most advertised projects during the bull run. 

Furthermore, art is the sector that has lost the largest market share (-17%). 

Despite 2023 being an overall challenging year, the fourth quarter has shown encouraging signs of recovery at all levels, both in the number of active wallets and in the traded volumes. 

The speculative bubble

Taking as a reference the monthly trading volume on OpenSea, already in August 2021 daily volumes in some cases rose above 200 million dollars, with a peak of even over 400 million at the beginning of May 2022.

With the collapse of the crypto markets in mid-May 2022, following the implosion of the Terra/Luna ecosystem, the speculative bubble of NFTs has also burst.

It is enough to say that by the end of 2022, the daily trading volume on OpenSea had dropped below 10 million dollars, and during 2023 it has decreased even to 1 million.

Starting from November, however, with the recovery of crypto markets, volumes have slightly increased, reaching nearly 7 million dollars on December 15th. On average, they are now between 2 and 4 million dollars per day.

The changeover between OpenSea and Blur

On Blur, which has become the world’s leading marketplace in terms of NFT trading volumes, the peak occurred on February 20, 2023, with nearly $100 million in daily trading volumes. Blur was launched during an already burst speculative bubble, in the midst of a bear market, and effectively replaced the trading volumes of OpenSea.

Although in October the daily trading volumes on Blur also dropped significantly, reaching around 3 million dollars, starting from November they have risen to an average between 10 and 20 million. 

The NF18 report talks about the real vampirization of OpenSea users by Blur, but also about the growth of layer-2 solutions such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base in relation to Ethereum.

In addition, it talks about Solana’s resurrection, after the collapse of 2022 caused first by Terra and then by FTX.

NFT18: the state of health of the NFT market in 2023

The report notes that, despite strong and widespread declines, the NFT market in 2023 showed signs of resilience. 

The turning point is the increasing use of this technology for useful purposes, such as in the Gaming world and in the Utility sector.

It is not by chance that the NFT sector that has suffered the greatest declines is that of art. 

In other words, speculation has been greatly reduced, which was the very cause of the 2021/2022 bubble, while what remains are the concrete uses. 

It is worth noting that the overall interest in NFTs has decreased significantly compared to the peak of early 2022, but it has not collapsed to the levels of 2020. In fact, it has returned to the levels of mid-2021, when the major bull run had already begun but had experienced a temporary slowdown due to the decline in crypto markets after China’s ban. 

Even China, despite a strong decline in interest, is still the country with the highest interest in NFTs. 

The future evolution of the sector

The future of NFTs seems to be mainly linked to the world of collectible digital objects, rather than artistic NFTs. 

According to the report, the current situation would be healthier compared to the bubble one, and it would indicate a much more solid restart based on concrete uses rather than mere speculation. 

For example, the volumes of those exchanges suspected of being mere covers for money laundering have been greatly reduced, and the downward trend in the average price of individual NFTs has effectively stopped since mid-2023. 

In other words, the worst seems to be over, and many of the most painful points of this market seem to have diminished to the point of becoming almost irrelevant. 

Perhaps the true NFT market is just beginning now, unless a new speculative bubble inflates sooner or later.

A new report has just been released on the state of the NFT market, which is also shown to be down in the third quarter of the year.

NFT market highlighted by the report

The NFT market is still in steep decline and seems unable to recover after the boom it experienced in 2021. While the second quarter showed a decline of about 25% compared to the first quarter, the decline was much more pronounced in the third quarter, with a drop of more than 75% in the dollar volume traded. In the third quarter, trading volume had been over $7 billion, while in the third quarter it plummeted to $1.6 billion.

This is one of the main figures emerging from the new report of the non-fungible corporation, on the third quarter of the year for the Non-Fungible Token market. The biggest drop is in the total volume of resale profit, which plummeted from $2 billion in the second quarter to only $326 million in the third quarter, down 84%.

At the same time, the volume of resale losses also declined, from $1.4 billion to about $780 million in resale losses. Indeed, for the first time ever, NFT trading posted a quarterly loss, with just over $450 million total losses (Profits – Losses). 

The report reads:

“Beyond these trading-oriented indicators, it is interesting to note that the size of the community has changed relatively little, with an average drop of 17% in the number of active wallets. Similarly, the volume of sales has stabilized slightly above the 10 million trades per quarter mark.”

Another important element to highlight the consistent decline in the market is Google search data pertaining to NFTs.

At the end of June 2022, search volume was again below the threshold reached in October 2021. In mid-September, this score was at its lowest value in 12 months with a score of 12. This represents practically half of the search volume between June and September.

China is by far the top country in terms of Google search volume. This definite interest in NFTs is in contrast to the very repressive government attitude toward anything related to the cryptocurrency industry.

Four of the five countries with the highest search volumes are in Asia. The only non-Asian country to make the top 5 is Nigeria.

Market analysis in detail

The Collectibles segment has given way to the dominant Utility segment in terms of the number of active Sales and Wallets. Despite a very complicated trading environment for collectibles, 7 out of 10 of the most profitable collections come from this segment.

In contrast, the gaming sector is showing good health. Despite a significant decline, the number of crypto gamers seems to be holding at a good level considering the context. The volume of transactions even increased significantly (+150,000) compared to the previous quarter.

In contrast, the art and Metaverse-related sectors declined. In sharp decline were the famous collections of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which, after $2 billion, made in the second third, collapsed to only $182 million in the third quarter.

Despite this, the so-called blue chips of NFTs remain the assets on which profit on resale can best be leveraged.

These are the assets that are held for longer periods of time. The length of ownership explains these very high-profit rates.

During this quarter, only 3 sales managed to generate more than 1 million in profit for the seller.

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The latest quarterly report from blockchain data analytics firm Nansen, highlights the outstanding performance of the NFT market, which has outperformed the cryptocurrency market since the start of the year, with social NFTs and metaverse leading that growth.

NFT report: market outperforms cryptocurrencies

The market fell quite sharply in February 2022, but the last 30 days have seen a decisive turnaround. The NFT market has continued to outperform the cryptocurrency market since the start of the year, returning 103.7% when denominated in ETH and 82.1% when denominated in USD.

Going into more detail on the fastest-growing sectors, the report showed that the metaverse is the driver, with a year-to-date return of 129.4%. The index also showed a slight decline in land and real estate NFTs, while Avatar and Utilities NFTs increased.

While the gaming and art sectors are the ones that would have suffered the biggest decline, the gaming 50 index recorded a sharper decline especially for the play-to-earn category.

“The NFT segment of the cryptocurrency market is fast-growing and dynamic and has proved to resonate with retail investors over the past year, with significant growth in Q1 of 2022”,

commented Louisa Choe, Research Analyst at Nansen.

“As more artists, creators, builders, and community members innovate with the NFT market we believe we will see a rebalancing of which sectors become its driving force”.

A month ago, a report was released by Non-fungible, the leading analytics and data company on the NFT market, in collaboration with BNP Paribas’ Atelier, a company of the French bank specializing in technology and digital assets. 

2021 was a record year for NFTs

The report undoubtedly showed that 2021 was the year of a real boom in the NFT market, with a 21,350% increase in the volume traded in USD and a 1,836% increase in the number of sales made. 

In detail, the company points out that the trading volume in the art sector exceeded $2.7 billion, the games sector exceeded $5 billion and the collectibles and fan token world exceeded $8.4 billion in sales.

“2021 was a breakthrough year for NFTs in terms of the volume and value of transactions, the interest of mainstream brands, the emergence of new digital communities, and the tens of billions of dollars of funding that went into projects. We are, however, yet to see how much of that translates into real products and tangible value for users”,

said Nadya Ivanova, COO and head of foresight at L’Atelier BNP Paribas.

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