NFT market remains sluggish despite crypto’s rise

Despite a broad-based rally that has pushed digital asset prices to levels not seen in years, the NFT market remains stubbornly mired in a bear. 

In the past week, large caps such as bitcoin have surged as much as 22%, climbing from $28,000 to a peak of $35,000 on Monday. Bitcoin in turn dragged much of the industry higher, with only two assets – Huobi’s HT and Trust Wallet’s TWT – among the top 100 by market capitalization in the red on a 7-day basis, per CoinGecko. 

Despite the broad-based rally, however, the NFT sector has largely failed to rise. 

According to data from Nansen, floor prices – the lowest price at which a single NFT for a given collection can be purchased – for major projects such as CryptoPunks and Pudgy Penguins are down on a 7-day basis, falling 4% and 5% respectively. 

The Nansen NFT-500 index is continuing to grind lower, currently sitting at a value of 308 versus a yearly high of 1,700 set in October. 

On Oct. 24, both the total number of buyer addresses (7,200) and first-time buyers (920) set yearly lows. 

However, there are some metrics that look promising for the sector. 

Overall trading volumes appear to have bottomed. For the week ending Oct. 9, volumes on mainnet Ethereum hit a yearly low of 29,742 ETH, or under $50 million. Since then, volume has begun to rally, with the week ending Oct. 23 seeing 47,369 ETH worth of NFTs traded or minted worth over $85 million. 

Additionally, there has been an uptick in “active projects” – collections with sales exceeding benchmarks such as 10, 100, and 1,000 ETH. On Oct. 8, active projects bottomed at 41 collections, versus 80 as of today.

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