Solana Soars, Flow Falls as NFT Market Declines Further in November

In brief

• Overall NFT trading volume dropped about 8% in November, while the total number of NFTs sold dipped 23% compared to October.
• Solana trading volume rose after a weakened October, while NFT trading on Flow fell by over 50% following a 60% drop the previous month.

Turmoil across the cryptocurrency market in November spilled into the NFT space, with falling crypto prices and declining NFT valuations further impacting an ever-weakening market. New data from DappRadar suggests that total NFT trading volume fell again in November, continuing a broader market trend that began in May.

According to data provided by the analytics firm, the overall NFT market produced about $643 million worth of organic trading volume in November. That’s down over 8% from October, when Decrypt tallied about $702 million worth of volume between partial data from DappRadar paired with additional marketplace data from Dune.

It’s less steep of a month-over-month drop than before, given a roughly 25% dip from September to October, but still represents a dramatic fall in trading action since earlier this year. The market peaked with $5.36 billion in sales volume in January, meaning that trading volume in U.S.-dollar terms has dropped by 88% since then.

DappRadar’s data excludes trades suspected to be manipulated through a process called wash trading. Wash trading occurs when an NFT is sold back and forth between a user’s own wallets at artificially inflated prices—sometimes millions of dollars above the market value—in an effort to manipulate token rewards models, or increase visibility of a particular project.

The data shared with Decrypt shows some significant upward and downward month-over-month shifts across blockchain networks and specific marketplaces in November. The Solana NFT space, for example, saw a 42% jump in overall trading volume in November, up to $95 million per DappRadar’s analysis. The vast majority of that trading came from Magic Eden, the top Solana marketplace.

Popular profile-picture project y00ts, which revealed its long-awaited artwork early in the month, drove the largest share of that action. Solana NFT trading has been on an up-and-down pattern the last few months, due in large part to hype around y00ts and its delayed rollout.

On the other hand, trading on the Flow blockchain fell by over 50% to under $7.7 million as NBA Top Shot notched its worst secondary sales month in two years—under $2.1 million worth, per data from analytics platform CryptoSlam, down even further from October. NFL All Day activity also declined in November.

Flow trading volume previously fell by 60% from September to October, marking a rough recent trend for the platform. Dapper Labs, the creator of both sports NFT platforms and the Flow blockchain, announced in early November that it had laid off about 22% of its team given current market conditions.

Ethereum marketplace X2Y2 saw its organic NFT trading volume fall by half in November, meanwhile, from almost $182 million in October to just over $90 million. Top marketplace OpenSea’s Ethereum trading volume dipped from $313 million in October to almost $259 million in November—its lowest month since June 2021.

Rival Ethereum marketplace LooksRare saw its organic trading volume double to $25 million in November, meanwhile, while upstart Blur topped $95 million after a partial-month tally of about $39 million in October.

Boris Rebo, data analyst at DappRadar, told Decrypt that the impact of FTX’s downfall on the crypto market indeed spread into the NFT space, due to falling prices and crypto values.

“Overall sentiment has been sour” in the NFT space, he said, and DappRadar recorded 42% fewer unique active wallet users interacting with NFT-based decentralized apps in November compared to October. That’s a sharper NFT-centric decline than the 12% drop seen across all dapps that the firm tracks.

The total number of NFTs traded in November also fell sharply month-over-month, with about 4.87 million NFTs sold on secondary markets. That’s down from about 6.3 million in October, between data provided by DappRadar and Dune for that month—about a 23% decline.

According to CryptoSlam, the most-traded NFT project of November measured in U.S. dollars was the ubiquitous Bored Ape Yacht Club on Ethereum, with about $63.8 million worth of trades.

Bored Ape prices fell sharply last month, dropping below $60,000 worth of ETH twice, per data from NFT Price Floor. However, the price floor—that is, the cheapest available NFT listed on a marketplace—has recovered in terms of both USD and ETH, currently sitting over $85,000 (about 66.8 ETH). Three Bored Apes sold for over $900,000 worth of ETH apiece in November.