NFT Debrief - January 2023

GM! Welcome to our monthly coverage of NFTs and the Metaverse. This month:

• NFT trading volume sees signs of revival in December

• Bored Ape Yacht Club launches Dookey Dash, a new interactive free mint for holders

• We discuss details of the new hybrid marketplace, Blur

🚨State of the Market

NFT sales volume rebounded significantly in December, finally breaking the downward trend. NFT sales volume on Blur reached $484M, nearly double the volume on OpenSea ($263M) during the same period. This is primarily due to Blur’s announcement of their final airdrop, which incentivizes NFT traders to place bids on the platform. Other notable developments:

• Kraken announced the launch of Kraken NFT on December 22, a gasless NFT exchange that spans multiple blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. The public beta of the platform is now live for users to sign up.

• On Dec 14, 2022, Magic Eden introduced Rewards, a system to reward users based on their activity on the platform. They also have plans to expand beyond Solana and Polygon.

• Ethereum and Solana ended the year as the two most popular chains for NFTs, with $542M (81.6%) and $77M (11.6%) in NFT sales volume settled over the last 30 days, respectively.

• Polygon climbed to third place in December, riding on the momentum of a slew of mainstream brand partnerships such as Nike, Reddit, and Starbucks. The number of users per week in Polygon’s NFT ecosystem has increased by more than 4X since early August. The blockchain had over 350,000 users in the week between December 19 and December 26, an all-time high.

• On December 15, former US President Donald Trump officially released his new NFT collection called Trump Digital Trading Cards, with a total of 45,000 NFTs made available for sale on Polygon. The NFTs depict Donald Trump as various personas, including a cowboy, superhero, and astronaut. The cards were sold at $99 USD each and served as a contest entry to win prizes and perks such as dinner or a meet-and-greet with Trump himself. The primary sale of the project raked in over $4M and sold out within 24 hours.

• The project initially received a lot of attention, with secondary market prices skyrocketing to as high as 0.54 ETH on December 17, nearly a 4X price increase within a day.

• Trump is no stranger to controversy, and his NFT collection was no different. People noticed that certain elements of artwork were highly similar to images from online apparel stores. Ultimately waning interest led to a decrease in prices. The daily trading volume of the collection has fallen 99.4% from its peak