What some people are calling the ‘Crypto Winter’ continues to have an effect on NFT sales. Not a good one.
The Guardian has a piece based on figures published by blockchain research firm Chainalysis, claiming that just over $1bn of NFTs were sold in June. “Their worst performance since the same month last year when sales were $648m,” as the article put it, adding that the peak month was January 2022 with $12.6bn of sales.
Chainalysis suggests that the decline is linked to the bigger wobbles in the cryptocurrency markets. We suspect there is also an element of people losing interest in the first wave of NFTs – those that were little more than an image or GIF backed by marketing hype.
Does this mean NFTs are on their way down the dumper as a cultural trend? Seen positively, it’s more of a spur to figure out what more these tokens can be and do, to provide real value to buyers, rather than a (now vain, in many cases) hope of making money by selling them on later.
For more on that in a music context, read our writeup of the music NFTs panel at our Sandbox Summit conference last week. Talk about community, utility and suchlike is all very well, but the decline in overall sales should be seen as an opportunity to deliver on that talk.
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