Real NFT sales data contradicts Wall Street Journal report of “collapsing” NFT market

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  • WSJ report completely contradicts the NFT sales numbers from other analytics platforms showing growth.
  • Some areas of the NFT market are emerging even stronger while other areas are getting saturated.

On Tuesday, May 3, the Wall Street Journal published a report saying that “The NFT market is collapsing”. In the report, WSJ refers to the declining sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It reports that for the last week, the NFT sales stood at just 19,000. This was a strong 92 percent decline from the peak of 225,000 in September 2021.

The WSJ report also notes that active wallets in the Ethereum (ETH) NFT market also declined by 88 percent since a high in November 2021. Although the numbers might have dropped, some of the top NFTs are having big sales in USD. Last week, the top five NFT collections alone accounted for $1 billion in primary and secondary sales.

WSJ has cited the data from Non-Fungible for its recent report that claims NFT sales are Flatlining. On the other hand, on-chain data from Dune Analytics suggest that the NFT market is still robust. The data from Dune Analytics show that NFT users and transactions are much higher than what is reported by Nonfungible.

Furthermore, Dune Analytics shows that the USD trading volume on Ethereum is the highest since February. The largest and the most popular marketplace OpenSea recorded $550 million in volume in a single day on May 1.

Market experts lash out at WSJ

Crypto market experts have lashed out at WSJ for their incorrect reporting on NFTs and for creating fear in the market. Tom Schmidt, a partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital, writes:

The @WSJ just published an article claiming that NFT transactions are flatlining, which appears to be totally based on incorrect data from Nonfungible.com (compare with on-chain @DuneAnalytics data). Did no one bother to check primary sources? Also why not $ volume?

Still no correction or retraction from @WSJ @paulvigna. Journos love to moan about fake news until they’re the ones posting it!

It seems that the NFT market, however, is getting more consolidated. Some areas of the market are emerging even stronger while other areas are getting saturated.

Nansen’s analytics platform indexes NFT collections by type. It shows the “Blue Chip” NFTs – from very established brands like Bored Ape, Mutant Ape, Yacht Club, etc – are outperforming other gaming or art NFTs.

The Nansen Blue Chip-10 Index tracker shows that the Top-10 NFT projects are up 81 percent year-to-date. On the other hand, indexes tracking the top gaming and art NFT collections are down 49 percent and 39 percent respectively. Last week, NFTstatics.eth shared data that shows the top-5 projects driving all the gains.

The NFT community on Twitter has started the trend “THE DEATH of NFTs….”. This is a sarcastic jibe at WSJ wherein the community members are sharing NFT sales worth millions of dollars.