Battle of the NFT Marketplaces, Volumes Return

Welcome to NFT Insights, a weekly newsletter focusing on NFTs and the metaverse! This newsletter will drop on Wednesday every week for Delphi members.

State of the Markets

Note: This inaugural edition mostly focuses on NFT activity on Ethereum, but we plan to include analysis on other chains as we iterate on these early editions.

Is the NFT bull market back? Last week, weekly transaction volumes on Ethereum broke above the $1B mark again (+70% week-on-week), a level last surmounted back in August 2021 when NFTs were going parabolic. OpenSea remains the king of the hill, capturing >90% of all volume on Ethereum, with Larva Labs (CryptoPunks) at a distant second.

We noted in Monday’s Delphi Daily how daily volumes hit nearly $250M earlier this week, the highest levels since the peaks of Sep. 2021. The number of unique wallets which purchased a NFT in December reached an all-time high, even surpassing prior peaks in August-September. In addition, average transaction value is hovering around $2,000.

Overall, these are positive signals of an uptrend in the broader NFT market, which we believe can be sustained by growing retail interest as NFTs continue to break into the mainstream; this is a trend we’ll certainly be watching in the coming weeks.

We believe this NFT rally heading into the new year is being driven by a few factors, including:

• Increased attention and buying activity from celebrities and influential names with large followings (aka more eyeballs).
• Recent $SOS airdrop to people who have transacted on OpenSea previously. Many participants received a free airdrop worth several ETH, cashed out and are plowing their profits back into NFTs.
• Completion of tax-loss harvesting for 2021 where low-demand NFTs were sold for a loss before Jan. 1
• ETH and BTC trading relativ