- NFT sales had a breakthrough year in 2021, and over the past 12 months, volume has hit $24 billion.
- But after nearing $1 billion in a single week in January, NFT sales have slowed amid an ongoing bear market in cryptocurrencies.
- These were the five best-selling digital collectibles that helped drive $300 million in NFT sales over the past week.
The cryptocurrency boom over the past few years has helped propel a newer market to record heights: digital collectibles known as NFTs.
The craze has pushed total NFT sales volume to $24 billion over the past year as artists, investors, and entrepreneurs descend upon the nascent Web3 space.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique, irreplaceable, mostly digital items that users buy and sell online.
NFTs use blockchain technology to keep a digital record of ownership, similar to cryptocurrencies. They were first launched on ethereum, the same blockchain that supports the cryptocurrency ether, and most NFTs can still only be purchased using ether.
But a months-long sell-off in cryptocurrencies has taken a bite out of NFT sales more recently. Weekly NFT sales have been more than cut in half from its early January peak of nearly $1 billion, according to data from NonFungible.com.
Weekly NFT sales fell 34% from $455 million to $300 million in the past week. Nearly a third of those sales were driven by the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, which saw sales surge to $90 million last week.
Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cryptopunks have maintained their dominance as the most popular NFTs to own, which shows no signs of slowing down after the creators of BAYC, Yuga Labs, acquired Cryptopunks from Larva Labs.
These were the five best-selling collections over the past week, according to NonFungible.
5. Meebits
7-Day Sales Volume: $5.3 million
Number of Sales: 286
Highest Sale Price: $51,000
Explainer: "From the creators of CryptoPunks, presenting Meebits. The next-gen "OG", 3D voxel avatars ready for any metaverse applications. Building upon the success of CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs to supply provably scarce and fairly distributed 3D character avatars."
4. Art Blocks
7-Day Sales Volume: $7.0 million
Number of 7-Day Sales: 3,344
Highest Sale Price: $995,000
Explainer: "A storefront for genuinely programmable and on-demand generative artwork that is stored directly on the Ethereum blockchain."
3. Doodles
7-Day Sales Volume: $7.3 million
Number of Sales: 235
Highest Sale Price: $90,000
Explainer: "Doodles come in a joyful range of colors, traits, and sizes with a collection size of 10,000. Doodles are a funky bunch that like to role play or transmogrify themselves into delicious treats. Holding a Doodle allows you to participate in coordinating the Doodles Community Treasury."
2. CryptoPunks
7-Day Sales Volume: $16.7 million
Number of Sales: 158
Highest Sale Price: $734,000
Explainer: "10,000 unique collectible characters with proof of ownership stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The project that inspired the modern CryptoArt movement."
1. Bored Ape Yacht Club
7-Day Sales Volume: $90.0 million
Number of Sales: 935
Highest Sale Price: $624,000
Explainer: "BAYC is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs -- unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card, and grants access to members-only benefits."