State of the Market

Over the first week of February, we’ve seen a slight dip in total NFT trading volumes as the floor prices of many collections corrected significantly. Weekly volumes on OpenSea are now at levels similar to in first weeks of January – but still significantly higher than December – hovering near $1.3B.

Close to 300,000 unique wallets have purchased a NFT in February, already surpassing that of last December just halfway through this month. We consider this as a signal of continued interest in NFTs. Average value per transaction is on a small downward trend, currently at ~$1,543, or just under 0.5E.

As expected, trading volumes on LooksRare dropped steeply after the halving of trading rewards from 9 Feb. This is because majority of volume on LooksRare is still due to wash trading for rewards. The number of daily active users tell a more genuine story about platform adoption: we can see that LooksRare is still far from capturing meaningful marketshare from OpenSea.

$LOOKS token price has also fallen >60% since the beginning of February. This is in part due to yield farmers selling and moving on because the APR is no longer as high, but also related to recent controversy over the token incentive model where the team was able to collect staking rewards for their unvested tokens. Over 23,000 ETH (~$73M) was cashed out by the team and sent to Tornado Cash. This token incentive model has been transparently stated in their documents, although it has led to some obvious questions as to whether it is equitable for team members to be earning so much in this way.

This week, we take a brief look at the relative NFT transaction volumes between blockchains over the past 7 days (we excluded blockchains with average daily transaction volumes < $100,000). We can see that majority of NFT sales by far are occurring on Ethereum, which captured ~83% of NFT transaction volume in the past week. Solana and Ronin come in at a distant 2nd and 3rd, making up 6% and 5% of total NFT volumes, respectively.

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

Thankfully, we’ve seen some green on the screen this week, with many collections recovering modestly from last week’s lows. Bored Apes, for example, are back above a 100E floor while Azukis are showing signs of strength as well.
mfers is probably the biggest surprise of the week, coming out of nowhere to climb into the top 10 volume chart. It is the brainchild of Sartoshi