OzOzOz studiz aboutz NFT

OzOzOz Learnz from da Pastt

While non-fungible tokens have been around for a long time, the market for them has historically been small. Early marketplaces founded in 2017, fought their way through a market dominated by Ethereum until blockchains like WAX and Flow emerged, offering application-specific chains for gaming and consumer applications. In 2020, NFT marketplaces averaged $1 million in monthly sales, and the tail end of the first Covid-19 year saw growth (now considered a spark) in NFT art and collectibles sales.

December 2020 saw an increase in NFT chatter due to the growing excitement of NBA Top Shots and early Ethereum card games like Axie Infinity and Sorare.

You may already know what follows, but let's break it down based on the data. Sports NFTs, specifically NBA Top Shot, was the first NFT narrative to explode at the start of the year (as a continuation of 2020).

Combining financial incentives with sports is a tried and true recipe, and crypto networks with tokenized digital goods are the natural steroids that will propel the industry to new heights.

In tandem with the rise of sports NFTs, 2021 will be remembered as the year of the digital renaissance. Platforms like Nifty Gateway and SuperRare dominated as the mainstream media watched the birth of new business models and monetization strategies, providing artists with a new format for monetizing their work.

NFT royalties are easily a tenfold improvement over the traditional artist monetization system, and nearly every artist's endeavor investigates how to issue NFTs. The excitement of digital painting continues into the summer, as new platforms like Art Blocks and Foundation bring on new artists and collectors.

With the continued growth of pfp/avatar projects and Axie Infinity's Ronin launch, which immediately experiences rapid growth in users and NFT secondary sales, the NFT summer moment is largely overshadowed.

The final chapter of our story is told through the eyes of Solana. With Ethereum experiencing increased gas prices, pfp creation and flipping shifts to Solana, which is quickly approaching Flow in Cumulative NFT volume.

In retrospect, August 2021 was the peak, with over $4.5 billion in NFT secondary sales, likely more when art sales and non-Cryptoslam tracked NFTs are factored in (e.g., digital land). The present has a funny way of distorting our perception of the past. Although the last few months have lagged behind the peak, it's worth noting that the NFT secondary market is still many times stronger than it was at the start of the year. In early January, $50 million in NFT sales was a huge accomplishment.

OzOzOz See da Futurez of NFT

The NFT market has officially surpassed $15 billion in secondary sales across multiple categories such as gaming, PFPs (profile pics), virtual worlds, sports, and collectibles. More importantly, the future is becoming increasingly multichain.

Several blockchains are creating robust ecosystems for consumer applications, based on the digital ownership enabled by NFTs. The future of NFT multichain is rapidly approaching. Three Layer-1 blockchains (Ethereum, Flow, and Solana) have secondary volumes of nearly $1 billion, and Ethereum leads all blockchains and Layer-2s with nearly $10 billion in secondary NFT sales.

While much of the NFT market is inherently financial, the expansion of all digital goods and services necessitates initial capital investment, and the public nature of crypto makes capital readily available for individuals, creators, and developers willing to build unique NFT protocols and products.

The majority of the NFT categories that saw explosive sales growth this year can be classified as cultural NFTs, including art, collectibles, sports, pfp/avatars, and others. As the world transitions to permissionless blockchains and tokenizes everything that can be tokenized, investing will become more democratized and will naturally expand to hobbies such as art, music, fashion, content, and others. Culture investing is still in its early stages.