Published on: 05/01/2023

NFT sales volume in 2022 almost similar to 2021 despite market decline

According to DappRadar data, overall NFT sales volume in 2022 almost matched the 2021 volume — which was the peak year for the NFT market — despite the falling prices and declining sales volume in some of the months.

Last year, the NFT market reached $24.7 billion in organic trading volume in multiple platforms and marketplaces. In 2021, the organic trading volume reached $25.1 billion due to the surge of interest in tokenized collectibles.

DappRadar does not include wash trades in its organic calculation. Wash trading is when traders sell NFTs back and forth between their own wallets. This practice often happens in marketplaces that offer token incentives for every trading activity, such as LooksRare and X2Y2.

Strong NFT sales at the beginning of 2022 — a continued momentum from 2021 — helped keep the overall trading volume from dipping. Top NFT marketplace OpenSea alone posted a $5 billion trading volume in January 2022.

The trading volume then fell from February to March before the awaited April launch of NFT land plots for Otherside — Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club-themed Web3 game — which allowed OpenSea to hit its highest trading volume for a single day.

The sales growth was temporary, however. The monthly trading volume dropped from $3.3 billion in May 2022 to just slightly over $1 billion in June 2022. From July to December last year, the NFT market could not hit the $1 billion mark.

Although the overall trading volume growth was relatively flat in 2022, DappRadar noted an increase in the number of NFTs traded. According to the analytics firm, there were 101 million trades last year, compared with 58.6 million NFT trades made in 2021. It showed that collectibles were traded at a lower price than the previous year due to the bearish trend in crypto and NFT markets.

The bearish trend in crypto sped up in May 2022 after the collapse of the sister coins Terra and Luna, which sent several other crypto companies into bankruptcy. Later in November 2022, the global crypto exchange FTX filed for Chapter 11 after its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried decided to resign from the compan, thus brought crypto prices further down.

CryptoSlam reported that BAYC was the highest-selling NFT project last year, with almost $1.6 billion in trading volume. However, most of BAYC’s trading volume came from trades from January to May. In April, BAYC’s token starting price was $429,000 worth of ETH. The starting price fell below $60,000 last November.

NFT market in December 2022

Compared to November, the overall trades last December rose slightly. DappRadar reported $684 million worth of organic trading volume last December. Previously in November, the organic trades were slightly over $662 million. The number of collectibles sold in December was 6.7 million, as opposed to 4.8 million in the previous month.

OpenSea maintained its position as the top NFT marketplace in the last month of 2022 by posting more than $297 million worth of organic trades. It posted $259 million in the previous month. Blur, a new marketplace with an incentivized trading system, saw a trading volume jump in December to nearly $177 million from $115 million in November.

The Solana blockchain, on the other hand, saw a significant decline in trades last month. Its NFT trading volume fell to almost $70 million from $95 million gained in November. The plummeting SOL value following the FTX implosion was likely responsible for its lower trading volume.

Last December, Flow — the creator of NBA Top Shot and NFL All Day — also saw a sales decline to $6.8 million from $7.7 million. The FLOW token hit its all-time low value this week amid the decreasing NFT trading activity on the blockchain platform.