February NFT Trading Volume Dips 28%

February has seen a significant decrease in overall trading volume. This is mostly due to the EOS mainnet swap, which caused some uncertainty and reduced activity across exchanges last month.

The “nft volume” is a tool that tracks the volume of NFT transactions on the Ethereum blockchain. The February 2018 trading volume dipped 28%.

Trading activity in the larger NFT sector fell in February, according to data given from numerous sources, after a month of record-breaking NFT trading volume for top marketplace OpenSea in January.

Volume of OpenSean NFT

Between NFT sales on Ethereum and Polygon, a sidechain scaling solution for Ethereum that minimizes transaction costs, OpenSea reported approximately $3.65 billion in trade volume in February. This information comes from Dune Analytics, which reveals a month-over-month decrease of 27% in trading volume on the platform.

Despite the fact that the marketplace had three days with more than $200 million in Ethereum NFT trading volume, the monthly volume chart shows a declining trend throughout the month. Nonetheless, following January, it was OpenSea’s second-best month in terms of overall NFT trading volume.

In February, the global NFT market generated $4.02 billion in “organic” NFT trading activity, according to statistics from blockchain analytics company DappRadar. This is a 28 percent decline from DappRadar’s prior January number, according to a spokesman.

Brutal Drops

DappRadar reported a 33% decline in Ethereum trade activity throughout the whole NFT market, as well as a roughly 61% drop in Solana, a 38% drop in Axie Infinity’s Ronin chain, and a 55% drop in Tezos.

In February, however, not every NFT blockchain network saw a decline. Because of the recent debut of UFC Strike, the rising closed beta rollout of NFL All Day, and the emergence of the BloctoBay marketplace, the Flow blockchain by Dapper Labs climbed by over 83 percent in February.

Meanwhile, owing in part to the Crabada NFT game, Avalanche NFT trade volume climbed by 20% in February. On Ethereum, the primary blockchain for NFTs, Flow and Avalanche now account for a modest percentage of NFT trade activity, although their respective shares grew in February.

According to DappRadar’s statistics, although overall NFT market trading volume declined in February, the business witnessed an 8% rise in total NFT traders and a 2% increase in total NFTs traded across protocols.

According to DappRadar’s lead blockchain researcher, February was a “very quiet month for NFTs.” However, he remains optimistic, citing Axie Infinity’s $4 billion in lifetime NFT trading, the growth of alternative NFT protocols, and younger initiatives like Azuki and Clone X beating mainstays like CryptoPunks and the Bored Ape Yacht Club in monthly volume.

Keeping an Eye on AppearancesRare

LooksRare made its debut in January as a serious challenger to OpenSea, with a unique token incentives concept. Users are rewarded with ETH not only for trading on the site, but also for staking their LOOKS rewards.

LooksRare’s trading volume exploded very quickly after its inception, far exceeding the general market. This was due to certain individuals abusing the rewards scheme by selling NFTs at artificially inflated rates between their own controlled wallets—as much as $50 million in ETH every transaction. It’s simply a wash trading strategy.

According to a January analysis from analytics company CryptoSlam, LooksRare produced more over $8.3 billion in NFT wash trading in little over two weeks. When compared to Dune Analytics’ overall trading volume data, that mark showed that nearly 87 percent of trade activity on LooksRare at the time had been intentionally manipulated.

However, after a cut in the site’s incentives rate 30 days after its introduction, trade activity on LooksRare has plummeted substantially. LooksRare’s daily trade volume has fallen below $100 million since February 22, according to Dune Analytics, after frequently reporting $400 million or more per day in early February.

According to DappRadar, LooksRare had total NFT trading volume of more than $6.5 billion in February, but does not include any of it in its calculation for “organic” trading volume for the remainder of the NFT industry.

Finally, some ideas

While some LooksRare NFT trading looks to be real and not enhanced to earn more rewards, a DappRadar official said the business is still working on a technique to “automatically and correctly separate” wash trade data from the rest.

The creator of CryptoSlam, Randy Wasinger, revealed that his team is currently finishing data analysis from February, but that his company has logged more over $6 billion in transactions on LooksRare—with “more than 98 percent” of the sales volume coming from “known wash sales.”

The probable wash transactions are focused in NFT collections that do not demand a creator royalty fee, such as Terraforms and Meebits, as previously reported. Both automated and human identification of suspicious transactions are part of the CryptoSlam procedure for identifying NFT wash trades.

The “solana nft projects” is a cryptocurrency that has seen a 28% dip in trading volume. The project’s creator, SONM, has released an update on their website about the situation.