State of the Market

We’ve just closed the book on the best month in NFT history. Over 400,000 unique wallets purchased at least 1 NFT in January (the highest ever by month). Yet, this is still only a small fraction of crypto users today. To put this in context, MetaMask reported >21M monthly active users interacting with Web3 applications in Nov 2021, which just goes to show how much more room there is to grow these figures.

Among the marketplaces, we are seeing a continuation of last week’s trends, with OpenSea volumes rising to nearly $1.5B for the week. Other notable marketplaces, including Ronin (RON), are seeing steady volumes week-over-week, with the exception of Larva Labs, which saw a sizable bump driven by CryptoPunk floor sweeps.

High volume wash trading continues on LooksRare while trading/staking incentives remain juicy (next halving ~10 Feb). In our Delphi Daily on 31 Jan, we highlighted this:

“When it comes to real usage, one of the most useful proxies is average volume per user. From the table above, it’s clear that LooksRare is dominated by wash-trading whales moving NFTs with size. OpenSea’s numbers are far more realistic, and the lack of any native reward only makes their data more believable. All in all, LooksRare is taking advantage of OpenSea’s unwillingness to truly embrace crypto and incentive mechanisms. But when the music stops, LOOKS token holders could be caught off guard by the lack of organic activity on the platform.”

A few interesting data points from Google Trends: worldwide search interest for ‘NFT’ has overtaken ‘crypto’, and is even starting to catch up to that of ‘bitcoin’. This indicates a high level of mainstream interest specific to this sector, considering the relatively short history of NFTs compared to the tenure of Bitcoin. Looking at the breakdown by regions, Asian countries (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea) are showing a high skew in interest towards NFTs, which ties in with the current Asian PFP trend (see next section). Could we see the interest crossover happen within the next few months? Only time will tell.

Note: We are watching marketplace activity on other chains and will continue to include relevant marketplaces once they achieve meaningful volumes (relative to overall activity).

Top NFT Collections This Week

Newer PFPs have been on a stellar ru