Rising tide or sinking ship

A rising tide or a sinking ship?

Last week, OpenSea announced that it would stop enforcing license fees starting next year. It’s a polarizing decision that means many things at once – brave, narrow-sighted, and most importantly, probably inevitable. One thing is certain: it is having an impact on the market.

You can’t call OpenSea’s decision right or wrong, because both depend on who you ask. Tech purists might argue that digital ownership means we own our assets and don’t want to know what to do with them. Creators, on the other hand, will say they won’t have non-fungible tokens (NFTs) if they don’t have an incentive to create them. You are both right.

The full effect of their new policy is nowhere near reached. Yuga Labs now plans to stop trading their NFTs on OpenSea entirely, while Mark Cuban called their decision “a HUGE mistake”.

The value of NFTs has already plummeted nearly 6%, almost all of which is in response to OpenSea.

Last week’s average selling prices took a huge tumble following the announcement, falling to just $26.29, the lowest level since NFTs’ average selling price of $24.98 for the week of August 17, 2020. Value is evaporating and traders know it. Sellers’ losses have narrowed to $9.5 million and it appears that they are increasingly looking to exit their positions for whatever returns are achievable.

Bored Ape Yacht Club #8585 is a perfect example of the losses traders are taking on their investments, which sold for $255,000 (153 ETH) over the weekend, a huge loss from the last sale of $1.03 million (777 ETH).

While there is no denying that value is declining, more emphasis needs to be placed on the parts of the NFT market that are growing. Last week’s total transactions of 3,701,871 is an all-time high for NFTs and we hit that milestone with 36% fewer sellers and 67% fewer buyers than at the previous peak in the week of February 14, 2022. The traders here are more engaged than ever and the infrastructure built around this promotion is designed to scale. That’s good because we’ll need it for the next race.

So back to the initial question: “Is the NFT tide rising or is the ship sinking?”. As with the royal house dilemma, it is both at the same time. Your answer depends on one of two things: were you here just for profit, or were you here to witness technological innovation and a cultural phenomenon? Now you have your answer.

Look at the charts

• Bored Monkeys They top the collection rankings by volume, but that’s largely due to big sales at huge losses. The average daily retail price of the BAYC collection fell as low as $38,000 on August 21st.
• “The four” DMarket, DraftKings, gods unleashedAnd That rare are one of the main drivers of the new record transactions in the NFT market with more than 750,000 combined transactions.
• wreck league achieves secondary sales of over 3.5 million US dollars with his two collections. An impressive achievement considering that only a third of the supply was sold in the primary sale.

• Solana is one of the few blockchains to record green sales last week, taking second place with $9.8 million in revenue.
• polygon continues to boast impressive numbers, boosted tremendously by DraftKings’ $3.8 million in sales.
• myth chain And ImmutableX round out the top 5, behind two mainstays of the bear market, DMarket and Gods Unchained.
• BNB OpenSea support may have ended, but there is still heavy volume on the Binance marketplace. Sales of around $3.9 million and an 86% increase in buyers show that there is strong demand for NFTs in their ecosystem.
• Bitcoin The number of NFT buyers increased by 97%, showing that many people are still interested in atomic numbers and BRC-20. Only arbitration saw a larger increase in buyers, up 104%.

Notable Events

• Sam Spratt launched an interactive gaming and art experience called The Monument Game yesterday. The 1/1 NFT of the collection currently has a bid of 95 ETH, and the 256 edition NFT to get into the game sold out in just 2 minutes and cost 3.3 ETH.
• milady We don’t seem to care that we’re in a bear market or that other projects’ prices are falling. Their average selling price of $7,000 to $8,000 has made them the third most expensive 10,000 edition NFT on any given day, making them a top seller DeGods.
• Theft on Solana has launched a new collection of NFTs and launched its gaming ecosystem with a new token called $COCO. The collection has generated over $1.5 million in second-hand sales in the past seven days.
• Slimesundays The Great Purge Event allows the public to burn NFTs on Base or Ethereum to receive one of its open NFTs. So far, over 1,000 editions of the Ethereum version have been minted, as well as over 2,000 versions of the base version.
• Open is in full swing, offering owners three new opt-in ways to claim new artwork after their smoking hot Pudgy Penguins Cooperation.