NFT Enters Period of Data Surge, Is an NFT Bull Market Coming?
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Will 2021 be the year of the NFT bull market?
In late June 2020, after two years of dormancy, the DeFi sector witnessed an explosion. According to data from OK Link, as of March 4, DeFi's total market capitalization grew from $3.15 billion to $95.83 billion over 9 months, an increase of over 2900%.
Following the rise of DeFi, NFTs were once considered their successor. In mid-to-late September, a surge in NFT tokens like MEME and GHST allowed many to see the gold-mining opportunities within NFTs. However, since most NFTs at that time still revolved around art auctions and gaming, and discussions remained at the vision level, the NFT market gradually cooled after a wave of hype.
It wasn't until 2021 that the NFT sector began to undergo qualitative changes. First, NFTs saw deeper development in their two traditional use cases—gaming and art—such as NBA Top Shot and major auction houses offering pure digital art auctions for the first time. Second, upper-layer use cases clearly expanded beyond their original scope, extending into music, social, content creation, and DeFi, with more diverse scenarios. Finally, the leapfrog development of infrastructure, including public chains, Layer2 , and issuance and liquidity platforms, provided strong value support for NFTs.
Canadian analysis firm Non Fungible directly stated: 2021 will usher in a new bull market for the NFT industry.
NFT Sector Data Soars, But Yet to Fully Explode
In late May 2020, NBA Top Shot officially launched its public beta. This NFT collectible card game generated $293 million in sales over 9 months, ranking first in total sales volume in the crypto collectibles sector. Among them, a LeBron James basketball card sold for $208,000, setting a new historic high.
Data website Crypto Slam shows that in just 24 hours, NBA Top Shot's sales exceeded $11 million, and over the past 30 days, its sales reached an astonishing $245 million, a 437.6% month-over-month increase. In terms of total sales volume, NBA Top Shot claimed the top spot in collectibles sales with $293 million, while the first-generation pixel avatar collectibles Crypto Punks and self-naming digital identity blind boxes Hashmasks ranked second and third with $98.5055 million and $37.1292 million, respectively.
According to Non Fungible data statistics, as of March 4, the NFT industry's historical trading volume reached nearly $369 million, with an average trading price of $68.85 per single NFT. When examining historical trading volume versus data from the past month, we found that the past month's trading volume actually reached $178 million, accounting for as much as 48.24% of total trading volume. Additionally, over the past month, the average price per NFT transaction was $1,572.75, an increase of 2184.31% from $68.85, clearly demonstrating the recent heat in the NFT market.
However, while the NFT sector continues to heat up, it is far from full explosion. As of March 4, Coingecko shows NFT's total market capitalization at $5.075 billion, representing only 0.33% of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization. Even compared to DeFi's $95.83 billion market cap, it accounts for only 5.30%, showing that NFT remains a very niche sector.
Multiple Phenomenal Products Emerge, NFT Ecosystem Becomes Increasingly Prosperous
Although NFT's market capitalization is relatively small, industry activity is rising. Google data shows that NFT-related search volume has already surpassed LTC, BCH, and XRP . Coupled with increasing participation from celebrities, high-net-worth collectors, and institutions, NFT has become one of the most promising development directions in the crypto space following DeFi.
At this stage, although NFT's primary use cases remain concentrated in collectibles, art, gaming, and other fields, significant development has occurred in two areas: underlying infrastructure and expansion into emerging sectors.
NBA Top Shot, which ranks first in total sales in the crypto collectibles sector, is built on the Flow blockchain. Flow is a new public chain launched in 2021 focusing on NFT crypto games and crypto art, developed by Dapper Labs, the team behind Crypto Kitties. In February, Flow announced it would bring the largest NFT trading platform Open Sea into its ecosystem.
On February 23, OKX officially listed Flow , with an opening price of $16.8. As of March 4, it rose to a high of $39.28, representing a nearly 392-fold increase over the past six months compared to its crowdfunding price of $0.1.
Additionally, Filecoin core developer Why shared thoughts about adding NFTs to the Filecoin network in a Slack channel, allowing people to mint and trade NFT assets like on Ethereum. The entry of high-quality public chains not only improves their own competitiveness but also provides brighter value support for NFT development.
Beyond accelerated infrastructure construction, while NFTs intensify exploration in existing fields, they are also actively expanding into more emerging areas. First, as NFT influence grows daily, it has increased exposure and liquidity for art and collectibles, while also paving the way for more real-world assets such as music, fashion, copyright, and film to come on-chain. Second, the integration of DeFi and NFTs has become closer, with significantly increased financial attributes, such as lending and liquidity mining. The birth of NFT index funds not only replicates traditional finance but also provides users with new financial investment tools.
On March 2, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee tweeted that 2021's NFTs share many similarities with 2017's ICOs and 2013's altcoins: barrier-free project creation, easy to understand and explain, ability to bring significant traffic, constantly rising prices creating hype/FOMO, and most having little value.
Looking back at the chaotic altcoin seasons of 2013 and 2017, behind the NFT sector's continuous heating lies its current state of野蛮 growth. However, the prerequisite for a new field reaching a turning point is precisely scale expansion and diverse competition. In the future, more and more new projects will flood into the NFT sector, and after the ecosystem fully explodes, we will wait and see who will break through.
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