2024 is about to pass. At the end of 2024, the airdrop of Magic Eden's token $ME and the collective recovery of ETH's "old blue chips", especially the sunny airdrop of the "Fat Penguin" Pudgy Penguins' token $PENGU, have brought real wealth effects to NFT, which has long attracted market attention.
What kind of year has it been for NFTs? BlockBeats takes a look back at the NFT market over the past 12 months. After reviewing the NFT market in 2024 with us, how would you rate the NFT market performance in 2024?
January: The world is divided into three parts, and the end of the "hexagonal avatar"
In December 2023, Solana NFT's monthly total transaction volume was about $365 million, slightly surpassing Ethereum's about $363 million. Looking back, this was the beginning of the three-way division of the NFT world among Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin (Ordinals). Although at the end of the year, Ethereum has re-proven itself as the current king of the NFT field through its absolute monopoly on the top market value NFT projects and the volume of players, if we go back to January this year, in 2024, the NFT market will spend the whole year in a three-way division.
Ethereum NFT started the year with "Vintage Mickey Mouse". Because US law only allows copyrights to be owned for 95 years, in January this year, the copyright of the old version of Mickey Mouse no longer belongs to Disney and is open to the public. So we saw "Mickey Mouse" dominating the list on OpenSea.
But then, there was bad news - Twitter cancelled the ability to use NFT as Twitter avatars. This seems to tell us that, except for Crypto players, no one in the world cares whether an avatar is worth 10 or 100,000 yuan. Anyway, do you still remember this "hexagonal avatar"?
This month's stellar new projects include:
- Pizza Ninjas (Bitcoin Ordinals), another Tier 1 project in the Bitcoin ecosystem was born.
- RSIC (Bitcoin Ordinals), the most popular pre-mined rune NFT series before the launch of the Rune Protocol, was quietly airdropped, and rune pre-mining became popular.
- Tinfun (Ethereum, later moved to Blast), Chinese power restores the glory of Ethereum mainnet.
- ittybits (Ether Inscription), a 10x opportunity in a niche track, drove up the entire Ethereum Inscription small picture, but unfortunately there was no follow-up.
- CryptoUndeads (Solana), got the Cabal plate that made a lot of money in pre-sale, passing by like a shooting star.
February: ERC-404 "Pandora's Box", Yuga Labs acquires "Moonbird"
The concept of "image and currency in one" became popular in early February. The first ERC-404 project "Pandora's Box" was undoubtedly the absolute star in early February, and its price soared nearly 30 times.
At that time, we had this idea:
ERC-404 directly creates a "symbiotic relationship between images and tokens", which can be traded on CEX and is also a subversion of existing NFTfi products. As long as the oracle is introduced, it is easy to leverage native NFTs based on ERC-404 (directly open long and short positions on ERC-20 tokens), and direct lending is also easy. It is no longer a form of storing small images in a specified address, but can be operated directly based on ERC-20 tokens.
But today, this idea has not actually been realized. Instead, the Hybrid "image-coin hybrid" model that became popular on Solana later, that is, the rise of meme coins drove the rise of the NFT series with community cult attributes, showing a double helix effect of liquidity.
In February, Yuga Labs announced the acquisition of Moonbirds’ development team PROOF, and became an NFT “giant” by owning top NFT IPs/projects such as CryptoPunks, BAYC, MAYC, BAKC, “Monkey Land” Otherdeed, Meebits, and Moonbirds. At that time, our view was:
Yuga Labs is no longer cool, and there may not be much time left for Yuga Labs to think. This will be a race against the bull market.
It now seems that the attention and excellent market performance that Pudgy Penguins and Doodles received at the end of the year provide evidence for this view.
This month's stellar new projects include:
- Quantum Cats (Bitcoin Ordinals), although the selling price of 0.1 Bitcoin at the time caused some disagreement in the market, the current price of 0.3 Bitcoin has made the project's status as a blue-chip Bitcoin NFT indisputable.
March: Blast mainnet launched, Runestone airdrop triggers rune craze
The Blast mainnet was launched on March 1, firing the “first shot” of the NFT market in March. But overall, the most popular market this month is Bitcoin Ordinals.
The first is the rise in the concept of "DMT (a concept that derives a generative art based on Bitcoin block data)" that began at the end of February. As the leader of the DMT concept, Natcats set a single sales record of 1.3 Bitcoins before listing on any Bitcoin NFT trading market.
Then there was the Runestone airdrop in mid-March, a massive airdrop that included more than 112,000 Bitcoin addresses, and in just two days became the third-largest NFT series in terms of total market value across all chains. It is also the predecessor of the current number one rune, $DOG.
The Runestone airdrop has a profound impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem. "Free, fair, and big truck" are the three key words that have become the criteria for judging whether a Bitcoin Ordinals ecological project is excellent for quite a long time this year.
Meanwhile, on Solana, Mad Lads reached its peak this month, with holders happily awaiting their Wormhole airdrop.
It was a busy month overall, but there was still some disappointing news. Starbucks’ NFT loyalty rewards program “Starbucks Odyssey” on Polygon announced that it would shut down after the end of this month, and Kevin Rose also caused controversy for selling a bunch of small pictures.
This month's stellar new projects include:
- Runestone (Bitcoin Ordinals), the rune legend begins with this stone.
- CENTS (Bitcoin Ordinals), 10,000 melted and chained penny coins, has become the most valuable art series on Bitcoin.
- Plutocats (Blast), which are very similar to "Nouns" on Blast, have soared due to receiving a much higher allocation of Blast Gold than other NFT projects.
- Crypto Valley (Blast), this farming game released 1,500 free "farmer" characters at the time, which caused FOMO for a while, but no one is interested in it anymore.
April: Bitcoin halving, Base NFT growth
The star new projects in March should also include the Open Edition series "MUTATIO" released by XCOPY on Base, which sold 1,023,831 copies during the 2-day minting period, with total sales exceeding 700 ETH.
But what became popular was the Meme token $FLIES launched by the project community in April, which surged after being retweeted and recommended by XCOPY himself.
On the Blast network, fantasy.top, a “friend buying and selling” game, continues to gain popularity.
Of course, the Bitcoin network is still the most popular. The halved Epic Satoshi was sold at a price of 33.3 Bitcoins, and an Epic Satoshi rune was born. It seems that everything in the Bitcoin ecosystem is stable and improving, but in the end, this Epic Satoshi did not bring much return to the players, and it was even a failure...
This month's stellar new projects include:
- Blob (Bitcoin Ordinals), a self-funded airdrop, opened with an all-star lineup, and took the lead in winning Epic Cong. Just when everyone was expecting a new Bitcoin blue chip to appear as a generative art, it collapsed due to a series of operations. This may be one of the most disappointing Bitcoin NFT investments in the past year.
- Prometheans (Bitcoin Ordinals), CyberKongz team’s first attempt to enter the Bitcoin ecosystem, was a successful airdrop, but then they failed in the sales of the PFP series, and then abandoned the rune No. 2 DECENTRALIZED and left the Bitcoin ecosystem.
May: The beginning of a quiet period
Starting from this month, NFT in 2024 will enter a relatively quiet stage.
There is not much to say about the degen community working on the chain this month. The news is basically about Pudgy Penguins toys entering the stores of US retail giant Target and DeGods returning to Solana.
The best performer this month was Milady, which bucked the trend.
June: Cold, lonely, miserable
This month, we saw CryptoPunks below 30 ETH. This is the first time since August 2021 that the floor price of CryptoPunks has fallen below 30 ETH.
In addition, the full set of gold skins BAYC + 2 MAYC + BAKC, a total of four Yuga Labs NFTs, purchased by Three Arrows Capital for a total of about 140 ETH in August 2021 and March 2022, were auctioned at Sotheby's on June 18. At the peak of NFT, the price of this set of assets should have exceeded 1,000 ETH. In June, the floor price of BAYC once fell below 9 ETH.
This is the darkest moment for NFTs. It wasn’t until the last week of June that the old Ethereum blue-chip NFT projects rebounded. CryptoPunks rebounded by 24%, BAYC rebounded by 30%, Pudgy Penguins rebounded by 50%, and Azuki rebounded by 35%. Solana’s top project Mad Lads also rose by 40%, and Bitcoin’s top projects NodeMonkes and Bitcoin Puppets also rose by more than 20%.
In June, another NFT project became popular because of LayerZero's airdrop, which was Kanpai Pandas. The market's dissatisfaction with LayerZero's airdrop spread to this project, and there was once a voice that suspected that the project was a "rat warehouse", but in fact it was not.
At the end of June, Abstract, the now popular "Penguin Chain", also debuted in its new look. As an NFT Layer2 chain, Frame, the predecessor of Abstract, has been silent since the official tweet announced the extension of the airdrop pre-claim period on January 30 this year. Until the end of June, Frame finally came up with a big move - the chain was acquired by Igloo, the newly established parent company of Pudgy Penguins. So far, the three brands of the Igloo ecosystem have all been unveiled - Pudgy Penguins, the on-chain IP licensing platform Overpass, and Frame.
Frame has undergone a brand rebranding. In addition to changing its name to Abstract, the overall vision has also been upgraded from empowering creators and providing a more convenient and secure NFT user experience to targeting mass consumers and promoting the mass adoption of Crypto.
Looking back, the fire after the cold winter began to ignite from this time. In addition to Abstract, there are some star new projects in June:
- Writ of Passage by The Beacon (Arbitrum), total 10,000, minting price 0.115 ETH, sold out in 7 minutes after entering the FCFS round. In the market environment at the time, it was really rare to sell 10,000 NFTs at such a price. Of course, the main reason why this one was sold out was that it was essentially a pre-sale of tokens.
- Gigabud (Solana), the public sale price at that time was 1.25 SOL. As the official PFP of Grass, this series not only brought a considerable amount of airdrops later, but also could be sold at a price of more than 1.25 SOL after the airdrop, which was very good.
End of the year: direct recovery to fever
The months of not writing in between are not because I am lazy, but because there is really nothing worth writing about. Here are some things that happened during these gaps:
- Magic Eden confirmed that it would issue tokens. Finally, at the end of the year, the $ME airdrop gave NFT players generous returns.
- Azuki has confirmed that it will issue coins.
- NFT has gradually become popular as a means of cold starting many projects since the middle of the year. At that time, the Free Mint project with a total supply of 1,000 or even less was popular, and it was directly stated that there would be token airdrops in the future. By the end of this year, we saw the popular Kaito.
- On the Solana network, the rise of the NFT series driven by the popularity of meme coins has blurred the boundary between meme and NFT, the most typical representative of which is Retardio Cousins.
- Ape Chain was popular for a while, and the low Mint price outperformed some projects with high multiples, but from the amount of revenue, there was no case that shocked the market.
Everyone has a deep impression of what happened at the end of the year. OpenSea is already on the way to issuing coins. Abstract, Monad, Berachain, Story and other chains that have not yet issued coins have brought related NFT projects to the forefront because of potential token airdrops (Related reading: What NFTs are worth paying attention to on public chains that have not issued coins?). The wealth-creating effect of the $PENGU airdrop has made Doodles, Azuki and even Cool Cats soar. New star projects have begun to emerge, such as Abstract's On-chain Heroes and Fukuhedrons on the Bitcoin network.
The long-awaited spring has returned, but only one old blue chip has left the market, and that is Clone X. This old blue chip with Nike background announced the cessation of operations on December 3, which shocked all NFT players just like announcing that they would no longer eat at the New Year's Eve dinner.
Looking forward to the new year, Abstract's mainnet will be launched in January. Monad, Berachain, and Story may also have new opportunities. I just hope that everyone will not launch too tightly, as diversion is not friendly to degen.
On the basis of the steady improvement of Ethereum's old blue chips, although it is difficult for Ethereum to have projects that can match the old blue chips (the investment and resources of the old blue chips make it difficult to imagine that investors will spend a lot of effort to catch up with what the old blue chips have achieved), the new narrative may bring new opportunities, such as AI-related NFTs.
More and more coin issuance projects may choose NFT, which has a small amount and is easy to control, as a warm-up method.
Bitcoin’s NFTs still have room to grow upward.
NFT is no longer the NFT we are familiar with. The content and IP narrative no longer meet the current standards for screening new projects. "Coin issuance" and "conspiracy" have become mainstream, but it does not prevent us from still discovering high-quality content that we like and love. NFT is still growing.
Maybe the concept of NFT is outdated, but the thing we like to play has not changed, it has always been pictures.
I’m finally done. How would you rate the NFT market in 2024?
