NFT market cap at $43 bln

The NFT market has sprung back to life and is hitting record after new record, following a couple of relatively dormant months, with searches skyrocketing on sites such as Google.

The resurgence in non-fungible tokens (NFT) has served to disprove multiple obituaries written for the space after it plummeted from its meteoric highs in early 2021.

An NFT is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, which can be sold and traded and has been popular with digital art because of the ability of blockchain technology to assure the unique signature and ownership of NFTs.

The digital artwork, “Everydays – The First 5000 Days”, a collage of 5000 digital images by artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, sold for $69.3 mln in auction this year, making it the third-highest price achieved for a living artist.

 

Interest surges 426% in a month

According to research data analysed and published by Wette.de, the global NFT market has a market capitalisation of $43.08 bln and its trading volume is around $3.6 bln.

For the past ten months, weekly NFT sales range between $10 mln and $20 mln, with a number of wild weeks that have seen up to $170 mln in sales.

Interest in NFTs has seen a meteoric rise the past year. Based on data from Google Trends, August alone saw worldwide interest in the NFT asset class surge by a whopping 426%.

At the beginning of August, the keyword “how to buy NFT” had 20 searches per day. By August 29, it had risen to 100. For perspective, the level of search interest is measured in points, with 0 being the lowest and 100, the highest.

As of October, Beeple still ranks first on the list of top NFT artists with a total artwork value of $145.03 mln. He has sold 1,346 artworks so far with an average sale of $107,752 according to Cryptoart.io. The second-ranking artist, Pak, follows at a considerable distance with $56.41 mln in total value.