On top of the world last January, the NFT have since largely lost their appeal.
Just nine months after its all-time high, NFT trading volume has been halved by 30 and is therefore down 97%. The bursting of this bubble could put an end to use for purely speculative purposes, and perhaps even make room for more practical uses of this technology.
An impressive drop
In an article published on September 28, the American newspaper Bloomberg shared the result of his tool that analyzes NFT exchanges. This data, retrieved directly from NFT trading platforms like OpenSea, shows that since their all-time high in January 2022, when NFT trading was $17 billion, it has plummeted to $466 million. in September. A figure which is therefore lower than July 2021, the date on which these exchanges had really taken off.
Despite the considerable drop in the number of sales of these non-fungible tokens, their holders have so far, for the most part, not given up on the idea. The number of sellers has indeed remained constant, around 45,000. As for the number of wallets with at least one NFT, it has exploded, almost doubling.
A consequence of the crypto crash, but not only
This trend was already clearly visible since January, with each month seeing the volume of exchanges drop. But it was of course the crypto crash last May-June that delivered the final blow. Ethereum, the currency mainly used for NFT exchanges, is certainly not the one that has suffered the most, but the drop of up to 65% in its value has probably cooled people wishing to speculate on NFTs. As for companies that have embarked on NFT with more or less thought, they have often since reviewed their communication. Starbucks or Reddit, for example, which had launched their own collections, now avoid making direct reference to NFTs, preferring for example the term“collectible avatars”.
Furthermore, trading platforms have always had great difficulty protecting their users against hacks, which represent a significant share of trading. Since these exchanges are almost untraceable, users who have lost fortunes in this way have almost no chance of ever seeing the title of their monkey drawing again. There is reason to be discouraged.
Source : Bloomberg, Gizmodo
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