OpenSea trading tanks, down 99% since May

The massive decline in volume on the NFT marketplace has coincided with a nosedive in crypto prices. The most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has declined nearly 57% since the start of the year to $20,276. The second most popular cryptocurrency by market cap, Ethereum, has fallen about 59%, to $1,528, over the same period.

As trading volumes and crypto prices have fallen during a downturn that’s been dubbed “crypto winter,” the floor prices for the most popular NFT collections, which indicate the lowest price that an NFT in the collection is selling for, have also plummeted.

The floor price of the most popular NFT collection, Bored Ape Yacht Club, fell 53% to 72.4 Ether (about $110,000) as of Monday, from a high of 153.7 Ether on April 30, according to CoinGecko. Another popular NFT collection, CryptoPunks, is down 19% from its July peak. 

A spokesperson for OpenSea told Fortune in an email that the marketplace isn’t worried about any decline in trading volume.

“We’re playing the long game because we see what’s possible, so we’re not that concerned about short-term volatility,” the spokesperson said. “We always expected frothiness, hype, and deflation as the community and use cases evolve, the tech gets more sophisticated, and creators figure out how to build more utility into their projects.”

The crypto downturn has left many retail inventors reeling. A study from Pew Research Center last week found that 46% of Americans who had put money into crypto said their investments had fallen short of their expectations.

Although crypto has become increasingly prominent over the past year, Pew found that only 16% of U.S. adults had invested in crypto, nearly the same number who said they had invested last September.

Update, Aug. 30, 2022: This article has been updated with a comment from OpenSea.