NFTs
NFT activity continues to decline
The last two years have been tough for the NFT market and 2024 doesn’t look much better. With a drop in sales and investors losing your appetite for digital art, market projections have become less optimistic, showing only modest annual growth of 2.6% until 2028, twenty times less than this year. Furthermore, the entire market is facing a substantial drop in users, showing that global interest in NFTs continues to decline.
According to data presented by AltIndex.com, the total number of active wallets in the NFT space fell to 197,000 in the first quarter, the lowest level since the beginning of 2021.
Ten consecutive quarters of NFT user declines
The global NFT market faces another difficult year. With collectors spending less and less money on digital art, the total value of NFT sales recorded on EthereumThe , Ronin and Flow blockchains plummeted to $145 million on May 29, roughly half the amount seen on the same date in 2023, while the total number of sales fell 20% to 53,900. But in addition to the drop in sales and revenue, the entire market was also hit by a huge drop in users, causing the total number of active wallets to fall to the lowest level since the beginning of 2021.
According to NonFungible data, in the fourth quarter of 2021, when the popularity of non-fungible tokens soared, NFT Markets accounted for more than 1.9 million active wallets, or five times more than in the previous quarter. However, after reaching this peak, the total number of wallets trading with NFTs began to decline and has been falling ever since. By the end of 2022, the number of wallets involved in NFT trading had roughly halved to around one million.
However, last year brought the biggest decline, with active NFT traders plummeting 78% to just 213,000 in the fourth quarter. Statistics show that the negative trend continued into 2024, with the number of active wallets falling by a further 7% to just 197,000 in the first quarter. Furthermore, this means that the total active user count in the NFT space has been steadily declining for ten consecutive quarters.
The NFT space has lost 90% of users since the market peak in 2021
The result of ten consecutive quarters of declining users showed devastating numbers; Over the past two and a half years, the NFT market has lost 1.75 million users or 90% of the number seen at the market’s peak in 2021.
Even more worrying is that this number is expected to increase by the end of the year, as the negative trend continued in April and May. On May 29, the NFT market had around 28 thousand active wallets, of which 13 thousand were unique buyers – 47% less than on the same date last year.
The number of unique sellers fell by almost 40% in this period, dropping from 25,900 to 15,800. A higher number of sellers indicates more supply than demand in the NFT space, which could cause NFT owners to lower their prices, resulting in a further drop in NFT market value.
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