Despite the NFT boom of 2021 making it clear that apes and punks are here to stay – at least for a little while longer – NFTs are still a source of furious debate and analysis in the crypto community. Are they investments meant to be flipped, or the digital versions of designer art?
For now though, a blockchain still dominates the NFT scene.
One blockchain to rule them all
Fresh stats are in from Messari Research and there’s no question about it. Ethereum still wears the NFT crown, seeing about $8.5 billion in NFT secondary volume during the first quarter of 2022. This was after an increase of a little over 50% in the last 90 days. Other powerful players included Solana, Ronin, Avalanche, Flow, and Polygon.
That being said, Ethereum still held around 84% of NFT secondary volume, according to Messari.
A quick look at CryptoSlam confirms this again, as the top 10 NFT collections by sales volume in the past 30 days were all Ethereum-based.
Still, the all-time winner was Ronin, with Axie Infinity making $4,064,275,335 in sales at press time.
The battle for second place
While it’s likely to take a while before another blockchain unseats Ethereum in the NFT market, which project might occupy second place? While Solana bagged about $700 million in secondary sales during the first quarter of 2022, its 90-day growth rate of 3.8% was far behind that of Avalanche’s 551%.
However, the scenes on OpenSea tell a different story, as Polygon NFT volumes are still much higher than Solana’s in the NFT market. Of course, the Solana integration only happened this month, but many were still surprised by the weaker than expected activity from Solana NFT traders.
On that note, Messari’s research also delved into the importance of what it called “static NFTs.” These refer to non-fungible tokens that are seen as luxury products rather than digital tools which fulfill specific use cases. With a market cap of $10 billion, the winner in this category was none other than NFT-based profile pictures, according to the firm.
Solana shows some soul
Despite a rather lackluster start to OpenSea, April 27 was a rather memorable day for OpenSea. [Solana] as the daily volume crossed 15,000 SOL for the first time. At press time, the approximately 16,446.25 SOLs recorded were worth $1,614,363.9.
