Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) took the world by storm in 2021 but have since witnessed a major drop in interest as their sales volumes keep decreasing, caught in a difficult period along with the rest of the cryptocurrency industry.
Indeed, the sales of NFTs on OpenSea – the largest marketplace for digital collectibles – plummeted in the third quarter of 2022, 60% down compared to the second quarter, according to the data published by market analytics platform Cryptounfolded on October 5.
As the chart demonstrates, the NFT monthly sales reached their high on January 2022, when they surpassed 4 billion, only to drop dramatically in June and continue their steady decline since.
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Continuous decline
In late September, Finbold reported on NFT monthly trading volume declining for the fifth consecutive month, crashing 97% since its peak in January, and ending up at barely $466 million in September, as per Dune Analytics information.
Earlier, in August, data had shown that the NFT trade activity in the second quarter had already plummeted 40% as the interest in digital collectibles dwindled amid significant challenges faced by the crypto sector. At the same time, it was also revealed at the end of August that NFT trading volume on OpenSea, dropped to a 1-year low.
Meanwhile, the waning interest in NFTs could partially be attributed to the fact that the vast majority of people, or more than 64%, only purchased digital collectibles in order to sell them at a higher price and make money, as demonstrated in a June survey.
Others (14.7%) purchased them in order to “join a community and flex,” while only 12.4% of NFT customers bought them for the sake of collecting digital art, and a very small portion (8.6%) purchased them to access games and tools.
Still some hope on the horizon?
Interestingly, a section of the crypto space is still bullish on NFTs, including Katie Haun, the founder of a $1.5 billion Web3 venture capital (VC) firm Haun Ventures, who had suggested that NFTs would make a comeback.
According to her, this comeback would primarily be pushed by the general shift towards a digital world that, in her view, would unlock a lot of new use cases once the infrastructure is better, “more efficient and user-friendly.”
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