NFT Sales Near $2 Billion in March as Blur Dominates Market

The NFT market surged in February, topping $2 billion in complete buying and selling quantity per information from DappRadar—a 117% enhance from the earlier month. And that momentum remained almost intact into March, with information exhibiting solely a slight dip to beneath $2 billion.

Market-wide information from DappRadar, supplemented with extra on-chain information from Dune, factors to simply over $1.95 billion value of buying and selling quantity in March, down about 4% from the February complete of $2.04 billion.

The overwhelming majority of that buying and selling quantity once more got here from Blur, with almost $1.35 billion value of Ethereum NFT trades on {the marketplace}, up barely from about $1.32 billion in February. Blur buying and selling exercise surged in mid-February when {the marketplace} launched its BLUR reward token, which has incentivized mass flipping from “whale” merchants—that’s, merchants who maintain giant positions in a given assortment and act as so-called market makers.

The surge in buying and selling quantity, and the ensuing enhance in total NFT market gross sales, has raised questions over whether or not such buying and selling exercise must be categorized as “manipulated” and even “wash buying and selling,” as information platform CryptoSlam has executed. DappRadar counts it as reliable buying and selling, nevertheless, and the pattern has continued with extra token rewards promised for customers.

OpenSea, nonetheless the main NFT market by way of complete distinctive wallets, logged about $424 million value of buying and selling quantity in March, down from $587 million in February. Total, Ethereum NFT buying and selling was almost even in March—from $1.81 billion in February to $1.82 billion.

Together with the slight dip in complete March buying and selling quantity, fewer NFTs had been additionally offered in comparison with February. Information from DappRadar and Dune collectively level to about 5.8 million complete NFTs offered in March in comparison with virtually 6.5 million NFTs in February. Regardless of February’s huge surge in buying and selling quantity, much more NFTs (over 6.6 million) had been offered in January.

February’s $2.04 billion tally was the most important month-to-month complete for NFT buying and selling quantity since Could 2022, when the market sank amid the collapse of Terra’s crypto ecosystem.

However with a lot quantity nonetheless tied to Blur’s rewards scheme, which is dominated by a small variety of whale merchants, it’s debatable whether or not the current rise in NFT market gross sales is de facto “natural”—not to mention sustainable, ought to the attract of token incentives fade.