While the crypto market was still down in double digits from its all-time highs, in January, the non-fungible token (NFT) market increased, even excluding artificial trades, per dapp (decentralized application) information provider DappRadar.
Sales in the NFT market jumped around 30%, compared to December, reached USD 5.3bn, and surpassed the USD 5bn mark for the first time since August 2021, according to data from the firm. Together with artificial trades, it reached USD 16bn, they added in their latest report.
Also, the analyst estimated that the floor (the lowest price for collection items) market capitalization for the top 100 NFT collections reached USD 14.8bn last month. This marks a decrease of 15% from November despite the 50% drop in ethereum (ETH)’s price over the same period, per the report. Also, the value for certain NFTs, such as BAYC, MAYC, Doodles, World of Women, increased in January, it added.
A new player, the LooksRare NFT marketplace, entered the market, reached USD 10.7bn in trading volume, and “shadowed the impressive start of the year NFTs had.”
While “looking only at the trading volumes may indicate that LooksRare is overperforming OpenSea and other peer marketplaces by a wide margin,” an “in-depth analysis in other on-chain metrics indicates otherwise,” DappRadar said, as “the metric is inflated by artificial trading.” Other analysts also noticed wash trading on the new platform. However, OpenSea itself admitted that the large majority of the NFTs created for free on its own platform are either spam or plagiarized.
Per DappRadar data, around 535,000 unique traders transacted at some point at OpenSea in January, almost 1,800% more traders than the 35,000 identified at LooksRare.
“The sales count follows the same pattern, with over 4.7 million trades executed in OpenSea compared to the 33,750 hosted in LooksRare,” according to the report.
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