On Monday, trading volumes for NFT avatars on the Reddit platform, the community website made famous by the Gamestop affair a year ago, hit an all-time high at $1.5 million in trades.
Yesterday Reddit Avatars did as much volume (~1900 ETH) as all the ETH NFT volume on Blur, LooksRare, x2y2, LarvaLabs, and SudoSwap combined. pic.twitter.com/C2rbpiZuQU
— NFTstatistics.eth (@punk9059) October 25, 2022
The new NFT avatar marketplace on the Polygon blockchain was launched by Reddit in July. The service gives users of the social network the ability to buy NFT avatars on the dedicated platform and artists to upload and sell them, even without owning a cryptocurrency wallet.
Last week a Reddit manager spoke about the creation of about 3 million Polygon wallets expressly dedicated to Reddit NFT avatars. And he also reported that currently there would already be as many as 3 million NFT avatars in circulation. Average sales are around $206 per work and 3.83% of NFT avatars are owned by so-called whales.
Reddit Avatar collectibles currently stand at $3.5M in volume from 16.9K sales, averaging $206 per sale. 3.83% of avatars are owned by whales.@DuneAnalytics dashboard by polygon_analytics. pic.twitter.com/AuE7Lfsu8P
— NFTgators 🐊 (@NFTgators) October 24, 2022
Market trending upward
Considering that Reddit currently has about 52 million active users around the world, one can see how the prospects for this new marketplace are very encouraging.
A company post reads:
“Reddit avatars are created by independent artists and are minted as NFTs on the Polygon blockchain. Users can purchase these collectibles on Vault, Reddit’s cryptocurrency wallet. They can then be worn and displayed as photos of profile when users create content on the popular social media platform.”
The success has been surprising and perhaps even amazed the creators of the project themselves. According to data from OpenSea’s secondary market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), Reddit’s NFT collections have reportedly surpassed in popularity the most well-known NFT collections.
Spooky Season, to cite one example, a series of collectible avatars created on Reddit’s platform, currently has a trading volume of 538 ETH (about $760,000), just behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s memorable NFT collection, which currently stands at 642 ETH (about $906,000). According to OpenSea, the Spooky Season collection has seen a 121% increase in the last 24 hours.
Record sales of NFT works on Reddit
According to analytics platform Dune Analytics, total sales of NFT avatars on Reddit reportedly exceeded $6 million. Evidently as reported by some artists who decided to put their works for sale on Reddit, this social is characterized by a lot of sharing among users, which is able to shift and influence tastes and trends of thousands of users.
Furthermore, according to data obtained from Dune Analytics, the works exchanged daily also reportedly set a record in recent days with more than 4,000 works exchanged on the Reddit platform
Some works on Reddit have already reached substantial figures of several thousand dollars, while some works have prices even at or below the price of 0.01 ETH.
the special feature of Reddit’s new marketplace is that it allows users to create wallets, mint and customize NFTs directly in the app. Users also have the option of displaying them as profile images when users create content on the popular social media platform.
The Reddit platform and the NFT market
Yet despite this incredible feat of avatars on Reddit, perhaps due in part to the novelty or the fact that the community is very strong and thus serves to drive sales, the NFT market has dropped a great deal in these first nine months of 2022.
In fact, according to a recent report, after the disappointing results recorded in the second quarter, the third quarter was still negative in terms of NFT volume and sales.
Indeed, in the third quarter, sales volume dropped by 75% compared to the previous quarter, which was already down by 25%.
After the boom of 2021 with sales reaching $17 billion with a 21000% increase, now the market seems to have fallen into a crisis that to some seems irreversible. But is this really the case?
The future of NFTs
The moment is certainly complicated as it is for the crypto market in general, but surely even the same results recorded by Reddit and its platform could in a way show some tentative signs of awakening.
Recent research by the analyst firm, Verified Market Research (VMR), for example, predicts a very profitable future for non-fungible tokens.
According to the report published by the global consulting and research firm, the total value of the NFT market is expected to rise to $231 billion by 2030.
According to the 200-page report, the growth rate of NFTs is expected to be 33.8% per year over the next eight years.
Thus it is difficult to make predictions about a market that is so volatile and tied to contingencies of the moment and also the fads that are circulating in the industry.
What seems certain is that NFTs are looking for interesting new outlets in such as those related to sports and major events related to it.
The world of soccer, basketball, and American football has been experimenting with the sale of merchandising items with this new system with great success for some time now, and the results seem quite comforting for now.
