CryptoPunks Lead Revival of NFT Markets

The controversial NFT markets are seeing significant increases in sales this month after a long dry spell. CryptoPunks, a modern NFT classic, are the driving force, reaching nearly $200,000 per piece.

A good four years ago, the NFT hype reached a peak when Beeple’s “Everydays: the First 5,000 Days” was auctioned at Christie’s for almost $70 million. This meant that digital art documented on the blockchain had reached price levels otherwise seemingly reserved for superstars like Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons.

But in the following years, the NFT trend cooled noticeably, as can be clearly seen in the historical price curve of CryptoPunks, arguably the most well-known NFT project of all time.

Back in 2017, Matt Hall and John Watkinson captured 10,000 striking pixel images on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain as NFTs under the title CryptoPunks; some of these characters can now be admired in museums.

So, it’s hardly surprising that CryptoPunks are once again driving a revival of the NFT market. Currently, resales fetch an average of just over 50 Ethereum per CryptoPunk, and with the ETH price curve also trending upwards, these NFTs are fetching the equivalent of almost $200,000. The data service CryptoSlam has recorded 122 sales of CryptoPunk NFTs in the last seven days, an increase of a whopping 400 percent compared to the previous week.

OpenSea Leads Blur

Statistics compiled by Dune also reflect a general upswing in the NFT markets. For the first time in months, trading volumes of over $20 million were recorded in recent days. The most important platform is once again OpenSea, followed by Blur.

Among the competing blockchains for NFTs, Ethereum is the market leader by a wide margin, ahead of Bitcoin, where NFT Ordinals and the BRC-20 standard only debuted in 2023. Currently, the Bitcoin Alkanes metaprotocol is preparing to further develop the BTC NFT market with new functionalities.

Ethereum NFTs absolute market leader ahead of Bitcoin and Solana

Despite occasional successes like Bonk, Solana NFTs have remained a niche phenomenon, and Ripple and XRP’s foray into the space seems to have completely died down. All the grand plans to bring NFTs into the mainstream, for example through portraits on social networks like Instagram , can also be classified as failures.

ApeCoin (APE) was all the rage in the crypto scene in 2022 and was linked to the popular project Bored Ape Yacht Club. However, a planned metaverse called “Otherside” never really took off, ApeCoin has plummeted 98 percent from its 2022 all-time highs, and there’s hardly any demand for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs .

Conclusion: NFT markets benefited from signs of an altcoin season

With XRP hitting a new all-time high and Ethereum hitting its annual high, a so-called altcoin season is on the horizon, with popular cryptocurrencies catching up with the price gains pioneered by Bitcoin (BTC). This momentum appears to be spilling over to the NFT markets, and CryptoPunks, as “blue chips,” are setting the pace.

If you consider NFTs as an investment, one thing has become clear over the past few years: projects and artists like CryptoPunks and Beeple, who have also gained a foothold in the traditional art market, have proven to be relatively stable in value with profit potential, and the Ethereum blockchain as the basis is the benchmark here. All the smaller projects, on the other hand, are highly speculative investments, and the majority of them end up being flash in the pan.

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(Featured image by Andrey Metelev via Unsplash)

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