NFTs Could Be Your Ticket Out Of Crypto Winter

NFTs have turned out to be very resilient as crypto markets have gone through a downturn in the early part of this year. In essence, insights from a recent Nansen report point to a strong performance from Ethereum NFTs in 2022 so far. In contrast, crypto markets have declined up to this point in the year.

Ethereum NFTs have largely avoided the crypto bear market

These findings on NFT growth in 2022 come from Nansen. For those who don’t know, Nansen is a blockchain analytics platform. In fact, the tools it provides have made it a very popular platform for top NFT traders.

Nansen found that the NFT market has outperformed the overall crypto market both in terms of ETH and USD. To illustrate, Nansen’s NFT-500 index grew by 68.5% between Jan. 1 and Mar. 9 in ETH value. Similarly, that number was 20.9% when priced in USD.

In comparison, Nansen tags Bitcoin’s value as decreasing by 16.2% over that same time period. Likewise, Ether went down by 29.9%. Clearly, this shows that NFTs have outperformed crypto by some margin this year. Even taking into account the fact that the NFT-500 had a dip of 28.8% in ETH and 38.5% in USD over the past 30 days (at the time of Nansen’s report).

It’s important to note that these numbers refer specifically to the top 500 Ethereum NFTs. In other words, one can not make the same statement on lower-performing Ethereum NFTs or NFTs on other blockchains.

Another key point is what Nansen’s analysis shows about NFTs relative to the price of Ethereum and Bitcoin. In short, the NFT-500 has negative correlations to both. This means that as the values of Ethereum and Bitcoin go down, the value of NFTs in the NFT-500 go up (in ETH). This is important as the relationship between NFT values and crypto values has been the subject of much speculation.

Nansen launched six new NFT indexes in February

The Nansen NFT-500 is just one of six new NFT indexes Nansen has started tracking. Each of the indexes tracks major NFT categories. To list, these include:

• The top 500 NFTs (NFT-500)
• The top 10 NFTs by market cap (Blue Chip-10)
• The Social-100 (popular NFT PFPs)
• The Gaming-50
• The Art-20
• The Metaverse-20

These indexes likely bring to mind the world’s most well-known index, The S&P 500. For those who don’t know, the S&P 500 is a stock market index that points to the stock price performance of 500 large companies listed on US stock exchanges.  What’s more, S&P actually has a number of indexes tracking crypto.

All in all, Nansen has put out these NFT indexes to provide a more sophisticated way to follow different NFT markets. As shown above, these indexes are already forming the basis of some quality NFT analysis.

Despite the volatility of the young NFT space, this report from Nansen shows that certain NFTs are actually proving themselves to be sound investments at the moment. At least relative to some more established cryptocurrencies.