State of the Market

We’re seeing some life in the NFT markets, with transaction volumes continuing to rise slightly from last week (OpenSea volumes at 0.9B, +15% week-on-week). This week, a new contender entered the ring with Universe.xyz launching its beta marketplace on 25 Mar, a product that has been in development for the past 9 months and uses entirely different smart contracts from OpenSea. Universe integrates directly with Gem.xyz too. We’ll be watching to see if it can gain significant traction in the coming weeks.

Another major story that’s evolving in real time is Ronin’s announcement on 29 Mar that there was a security breach on the network resulting in 173,600 ETH and 25.5M USDC drained. The total value of the exploit was north of $600M, making it one of the largest hacks in crypto history. Axie/Ronin transaction volumes will likely be adversely affected for a period of time as users and investors ponder the implications of this.

Over 328,000 unique wallets purchased at least 1 NFT in March. This is a decrease of 25% from the peak in Jan 2022 but is still higher than any other month in 2021. Given the huge design space for NFTs & growing mainstream interest from celebrities and brands, it is a question of when, not if, these numbers will start to pick up again.

Tiffany & Co. is the latest big brand to join the NFT movement by acquiring a Tom Sachs: Rocket Factory NFT this week (alongside its partnership announcement). Visa also just formally announced its new creator program, “an initiative that aims to help digital-first artists, musicians, fashion designers, and filmmakers accelerate their small business through non-fungible tokens (NFTs).”

Ethereum continues to maintain its dominance of sales volume by blockchain since our last look at this in February (83% this week, unchanged). However, total sales volumes are down significantly since then. What’s interesting though is that Solana is capturing a rising proportion of sales volume (10% this week vs 6% previously)