NFT sales plummet 92%, several art owners lose money

New Delhi: In what could dampen the mood of crypto lovers, sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have fallen a massive 92 per cent since September last year, shows data from popular website NonFungible.

The sale of NFTs fell to a daily average of about 19,000 this week, a 92 per cent decline from a peak of about 225,000 in September, reports Wall Street Journal, citing the data.

According to the report, the number of active wallets in the NFT market fell 88 per cent to about 14,000 last week from a high of 119,000 in November.

The incredible enthusiasm for NFTs led to tremendous growth of the niche industry in 2021.

The word NFT was chosen by the Collins dictionary as the word of the year for 2021. The Collins dictionary described NFT as “the unique digital identifier that records ownership of a digital asset”.

However, with nearly $8 billion traded in the first quarter of 2022, the market cannot really be considered to have collapsed.

“We are seeing more of a form of stabilisation, in line with the last quarter of 2021. Conversely, the volume of sales fell by nearly 50 per cent, with a very marked slowdown in the volume of buyers and sellers,” according to NonFungible.

Many NFT owners now find their investments significantly less than when they bought those pieces of art.

Crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi paid $2.9 million for an NFT of then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet.

Last month, he planned to sell it and to his horror, he received a top bid of just $6,800.

Estavi had put the NFT up for resale on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, asking for $48 million.

The NFT market currently represents segments like collectibles, sports, entertainment, and arts.

The global NFT market is dominated by players like Binance, Dapper Labs, Foundation Labs, Gala Games, Onchain Labs, OpenSea, Theta Labs, Yellowheart, and Yuga Labs, among others

The niche Indian NFT market now has players like WazirX NFT marketplace, Jupiter Meta, Rario and BeyondLife.club, etc

Cricketers such as Virender Sehwag, Sunil Gavaskar, Zaheer Khan, Rishabh Pant and Bollywood celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Rajinikanth, Sunny Leone and Flora Saini have joined the world of NFTs.