What these BAYC sales tell us about the NFT space’s status

• The NFT space has been badly affected by the decline and bearish trend of the crypto-market
• The dominance and recent record sales of BAYC NFTs, however, established that NFTs are far from done

The demise of high-profile endeavours like Terra and FTX has not helped the situation. According to some, even more damage appears to have been done to the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) space, with some commentators even declaring the end of NFTs.

On the contrary, a recent Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT sale seemed to suggests otherwise.

NFTs dead? These stats beg to differ

NFT #232 of the Bored Ape Yacht Club was sold on the secondary market on 23 November for 800 ETH, or roughly $927,000. Known pseudonym collector Keung obtained the tokenized profile photo (PFP) from Deepak Thapliydal, CEO of Web3 cloud software firm Chain. According to Rarity Tools, this Ape with gold fur is 324th rarest out of a pool of 10,000 NFTs. Less than 0.5% of Bored Apes are estimated to have golden fur.

While overall NFT sales have been falling, recent strong sales like these have cast doubt on whether or not NFTs are truly dead. In the NFT market, Ethereum NFTs, especially the BAYC collection, has been showing signs of dominance and keeping the market active.

DappRadar data revealed that over $2.5 million in sales were attributed to BAYC NFTs over the course of the last 24 hours. BAYC #1268, which sold for over $938 thousand on 24 November, outperformed BAYC #232’s sales. The BAYC and CryptoPunk Collection dominated the ranks, generating over half a million USD in total Top Sales metrics over a 30-day period.

Source: DappRadar

Moving away from the Top Sales measure and taking a look at the Top Collection metric likewise revealed BAYC’s dominance. The volume of trades in the BAYC collection surged by more than 45% over the last 30 days. More than $36 million worth of trades were made during this time. There were 473 traders, and there were 392 sales, up 77 and 79 percent, respectively.

Among the many collections maintained by Yuga Labs is the BAYC archive. The Lab also features additional collections, such as the CryptoPunk collection, which ranks among the highest in terms of sales and volume. In fact, it seemed clear that NFT sales are declining, according to NonFungible’s chart. 

Source: NonFungible

The aforementioned chart also showed that there was a drop in the value of sales, not a decline in NFT sales, which was another thing that could be inferred.

The fall is a result of the general crypto-market’s loss in value, something that has affected popular cryptocurrencies like ETH and BTC across the board.