State of the Market

This marks the 3rd week in a row of increasing NFT transaction volume, with OpenSea’s weekly volume breaking above the $1B mark again. Could this mark the beginning of a new bull cycle for NFTs? Some indicators seem to suggest so:
1) weekly transaction volumes appear to have bottomed out.
2) macro sentiment around crypto seems to be improving.
3) Azuki’s rise as a trigger point for a new wave of interest (see later section).

If we look at the change in NFT sales volume over a 7-day & 30-day period, we can see that Ethereum and Solana show relative strength compared to the other chains. This is most apparent over the last 7 days, with volumes rising over 40% and 18.5% on Ethereum and Solana respectively. Ronin (Axie Infinity) saw the largest decline in volumes over the same period.

Interestingly, there has been a significant rise in trade volumes on Immutable X over the past few days. On closer inspection, more than 90% of the volume is driven by a single collection: Gary Vee’s Book Games. This is likely due to the fact that having a Book Games NFT acts as a possible avenue to join the whitelist for the upcoming VeeFriends Series 2 launch (the snapshot has already been taken on April 5th, however).

After filtering for wash trading, real transaction volumes on LooksRare continue to slowly grow, indicative of a sustained level of usage. A few new features were added in recent weeks, including the LOOKS compounder (automatically compounds WETH rewards into $LOOKS), and several optimizations to improve the speed of mint reveals and image loading.

If you have bought NFTs using Gem in the past month, you might have earned some $LOOKS which you can check here.

Top NFT Collections This Week

Azuki has been blazing hot, with floor prices jumping up another 50% after last week’s already meteoric rise. BEANZ Official is the mysterious item that was airdropped to Azuki holders on 31 Mar and has seen heavy demand ever since — it already has more unique owners than Azuki. This has also re-ignited the anime