Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Wenser (@wenser 2010)
At the end of the year, the crypto industry also welcomes its 'year-end summary moment', compared to the hot sectors of AI, Meme, and Desci, NFTs undoubtedly seem a bit lonely. If it weren't for the recent launch of Pudgy Penguins' PENGU tokens, many might be left wondering, 'Did NFT bull markets really exist?'
Looking back on the entire year of 2024, the NFT sector can be described as 'full of twists and turns'. Nevertheless, it undeniably holds a place in the crypto market, even becoming a constant presence that drives trends. In conjunction with this article, Odaily Planet Daily will review a series of representative events in the NFT sector throughout 2024, allowing us to reminisce about this year of 'love and hate' for NFTs.
First half of 2024: A fantastic start and the 'Meme King'.
Back to the beginning of 2024, for many NFT players, it can be described as a 'fantasy start'.
After experiencing a series of hype surrounding NFTs in the BTC ecosystem, market sentiment warmed up for a while, with BTC NFTs like Node Monkeys and Puppet Monkeys seeing prices soar to 0.5 BTC. Now, with BTC prices breaking a new high of $108,000, it still amazes people. To say the heart-wrenching truth, for many BTC inscription players, NFT players, and even later rune players, rushing left and right, with constant FOMO, the outcome is likely just 'the harder you try, the more you lose', rather than simply holding coins without action.
But in any case, under the favorable stimuli of BTC spot ETF about to be approved, 'the year 2024 belonging to the NFT sector' has finally begun, and the first to take the stage is the Ethereum ecosystem NFT project—Tinfun.
January: The 'IP dream' of the top KOL in the Chinese NFT circle.
As a top KOL in the Chinese NFT circle, the launch of Tinfun undoubtedly gathered much of Laser Cat's efforts. Additionally, the Alpha community behind it, the Eastern ink painting style of Tinfun NFTs, and the narrative of the martial arts world are also among the many reasons for Tinfun's high attention.
After Azuki achieved tremendous success, countless players in the Chinese NFT circle hoped for a project that could genuinely represent 'Eastern aesthetics' to stand out and gather its own fan base in the crypto world, proving to the world that 'Chinese flow is the most awesome!' Based on the NFT example images released by the project, Tinfun undoubtedly has such potential, leading many to have high expectations for it. Not only that, during that time, Tinfun's mini-games were also greatly welcomed by the community, as it was nearing the end of the year and approaching the Spring Festival, creating a festive entertainment atmosphere; furthermore, Tinfun also made minor innovations to the NFT minting process—pioneering the 'money flow minting' approach, which alleviated the troubles caused by excessive Gas waste when NFT players rushed to mint.
Due to favorable stimuli from various factors, on January 7, the day of the public sale, the deposits received by the TinFun project exceeded 10,000 ETH within less than 24 hours, equivalent to about $22.8 million; and by January 8, the participation amount in the public sale reached the expected goal of 25,000 ETH, leading to an early end to the public sale. Due to the large participation amount, many overseas bloggers were suspicious that Laser Cat would 'run away directly', after all, in the dark forest of the crypto circle where trust is non-existent, human nature often cannot withstand the test.
However, it is clear that Laser Cat and the team behind it are not the type of people to do so, and Laser Cat himself even stated, 'I might fail, but I will definitely not run away.'
The airdrops and secondary trading after Tinfun also once triggered market FOMO, with the floor price breaking through 0.8 ETH; but after the opening image, the artistic details and homogeneity issues of Tinfun NFTs were inevitably questioned by the market. Coupled with Tinfun's subsequent planning of an 'IP development route', it ultimately could not escape the fate of the 'floor price spiral decline' of NFT projects.
According to data from NFTGo, the current floor price of Tinfun NFT is around 0.11 ETH, but the average transaction price is around 0.5 ETH, while the number of holding addresses has gradually decreased to about 1,400.
Information regarding Tinfun floor prices, source: NFTGo.
It is worth mentioning that, influenced by Blur's third phase activities and the expectations for the Blast airdrop, Tinfun decided through community voting in early March to migrate the project to the Blast chain. Subsequently, some Tinfun holders also received certain rewards in the form of Blast ecosystem golden points due to various Blast projects or activities, but in terms of NFT returns, it can only be described as better than nothing.
Looking back now, on some level, the Tinfun project illustrates one thing: NFT projects still cannot escape the 'liquidity trap' and avoid the downward spiral of crypto market project tokens/NFT prices, especially along the IP development route, which undoubtedly makes things even more difficult.
In February, Nobody: 'The Stephen Chow aura' enhances the NFT community.
If Tinfun set a good precedent for NFTs in 2024, then Stephen Chow's NFT project Nobody seems more like another 'star NFT project' that 'rose by leveraging the momentum'.
The project took over half a year, initially named Moonbox after borrowing the well-known movie (A Chinese Odyssey) by Stephen Chow. The project name was later changed to Nobody to enhance community attributes, with some community members even writing songs and painting under the name Nobody, initiating a series of secondary creations. After Tinfun successfully launched with the 'money flow minting' method, Nobody similarly followed suit and successfully completed its NFT sale.
Not only that, after the sale ended, the floor price of Nobody quickly increased by about 5 times, breaking through 0.9 ETH on February 5, with a trading volume of 2500 ETH, causing countless people to FOMO into the market, with continuous buying. It must be said that at that time, many NFT players did not deeply participate in this project due to the previous stereotype that 'star NFT projects are scams and money grabs', and were equally unprepared for this violent surge.
Of course, those who did not benefit from this wave of increases naturally avoided the subsequent downturns that could be faced.
Although Stephen Chow himself later interacted with the Nobody community on Discord and even opened an account on platform X to solicit community feedback on the project's subsequent development, as did Memeland founder and 9GAG CEO Chen Zhancheng (9gagceo.eth), who bought Nobody #889 NFT at a price of 19.52 WETH to express support, Nobody still followed the path of most NFT projects, experiencing a decline in price after the 'opening image controversy', eventually dropping below the issuance price of 0.19527 ETH in mid-March, and subsequently falling into silence.
According to data from NFTGo, the current floor price of Nobody is around 0.054 ETH, and the number of holding addresses is around 3,000. As for Stephen Chow's account on platform X, the last update has remained on a promotional post about a short drama from June 1 of this year.
Information regarding Nobody NFT floor prices, source: NFTGo
Thus, another 'failure case of star NFTs' was added. Even the comedy king and one-time film emperor Stephen Chow could not break this curse.
March BOME: A frenzy of Meme coins triggered by NFT artists.
As March approached, there were hardly any specific NFT projects worth mentioning, but just like the theme song of (Ultraman Tiga) sings: 'A new storm has emerged, how can we remain stagnant?'
Just as the market was immersed in the joy of BTC prices breaking new highs, a frenzy of Meme coins triggered by NFT artists was quietly brewing in the background.
Crypto artist Darkfarms 1 took the lead in firing the 'first shot for NFT artists to issue tokens in 2024'. Perhaps someone had done this before him, but it has never reached the height of the project he launched because this Meme coin is called BOME (Book Of MEME). After raising 10,000 SOL, Darkfarms 1 also passed the test of human nature without running away with the funds, instead, he innovatively added a large amount of money to the token liquidity pool, thus launching a '3-day rapid Binance' Meme coin miracle.
On March 14, shortly after the sale of BOME, its market value quickly broke $50 million; within 9 hours of launch, its market value surpassed $100 million, and the price broke $0.0015, rising over 30 times from the issuance price.
On March 15, the price of BOME broke $0.0025, setting a new record; soon after, its price soared rapidly as if riding a rocket, and around midnight on the 15th, the price of BOME successfully exceeded $0.01, with its market value growing to nearly $700 million.
Due to the soaring price of BOME, the floor price of the NFT series SMOWL previously launched by Darkfarms once broke 0.4 ETH, with a single-day increase of 71.14%, and a 7-day increase of 713.66%; in addition, on the day BOME launched, the number of active addresses on the Solana network reached a near one-month peak (1.19 million), showing a maximum growth of 115.66% during the period from February 14 to March 14; influenced by the BOME craze, from March 14 to 16, the number of new Meme coins issued on the Solana network surged, with 8,849 new SPL tokens added on March 14, expected to exceed the near one-month peak (9,690) this week.
Not only that, BOME also pioneered a new asset issuance method called 'donation-based token issuance', leading to countless imitators. For example, the Meme project COCO (Little Crocodile) initiated by NFT artist and crypto KOL Kero (@KeroNFTs) received over 42,000 SOL, worth over $7.5 million, just 2 hours after initiating the donation. The market went crazy for a while. Additionally, MFERS founder Satoshi and Doodles co-founder also followed suit, with Meme coins issued by NFT artists like MFERSCOIN becoming active in the Solana, ETH, and Base ecosystems.
Of course, this path of token issuance has also brought more scams to the market, including crypto KOL VT who fraudulently obtained over 20,000 BNB, the crypto veteran Huang Licheng (Maji) who fraudulently raised nearly 190,000 SOL, and Dexter behind GM.ai who raised nearly 160,000 SOL, all of whom are beneficiaries of this process.
But none of this can skip the critical step, which is—Binance listing BOME.
On March 16, at noon, according to official announcements, Binance will launch BOME 1-50 times U-based perpetual contracts on March 16, 2024, at 20:30 (UTC+8).
As news broke, market sentiment began to shift from craziness to frenzy.
After all, for many crypto projects that have undergone several rounds of VC investment and community financing, it is quite a challenge for a token to queue up for listing on Binance. Now, however, a Meme coin released by a single NFT artist has completed in just three days what many projects cannot achieve in three years—the 'Binance listing journey'. This is hard not to evoke a sense of defeat that 'doing a serious project cannot compare to issuing a Meme coin'. Additionally, the Solana ecosystem's one-click token issuance platform pump.fun began to emerge, thus starting the 'Meme coin craze', which has defined this year and even this cycle.
Although Binance took the opportunity to launch a batch of 'VC coins' when market sentiment was high and liquidity was good, many 'high FDV, low circulation' project tokens, apart from unilaterally extracting liquidity from the market, are difficult to compete with Meme coins, which have a lower understanding threshold, broader public base, and lower buying costs, making them easily discarded.
After all, in the eyes of many, countless seemingly serious VC coins are, from a utility perspective, even less useful than 'Meme coins that make people smile and provide emotional value'.
From another comparative perspective, Meme coins are also fungible tokens of NFTs. We elaborated on this view in our article (Meme Coins: The Complete Substitute for NFTs) in May this year, which you are welcome to review.
Regarding the NFT sector, in the first half of the year, the 404 protocol, which focused on the concept of 'image-to-token conversion', once sparked market FOMO, with the price of Pandora protocol token PANDORA exceeding $30,000, showing exaggerated growth. Subsequent 314 protocols (details can be seen in the article (Will the 314 protocol be the next ERC 721?)) also brought a short-term focus to the market, but ultimately faded into obscurity due to the inability to sustain liquidity.
Regarding the NFT sector in the first half of the year, there are three noteworthy events:
Firstly, taking advantage of the Meme coin craze in the Solana ecosystem, Base attracted a certain amount of market liquidity in March and April due to the low interaction costs of the ecosystem, during which NFTs briefly gained some market attention. We previously introduced some representative projects in the article (Counting the Leading NFTs in the Base Ecosystem, Who Rose, Who Fell, Who Issued Tokens?), although no project successfully broke through later, it still brought some incremental growth to the NFT sector in 2024.
Thirdly, this year is also the year of the U.S. presidential election, and as the Republican presidential candidate, Trump has also been 'frequently active' in the NFT sector. Previously, he launched the first NFT series 'Trump Digital Trading Cards' in December 2022; in 2023, he released two new NFT series 'Trump Digital Trading Cards Series 2' and 'Mugshot Edition', making a total profit of up to $7.15 million from these NFTs, indirectly confirming that the cash-earning ability of celebrity NFTs is indeed strong, although the result is likely to be disastrous.
Thirdly, the well-known NFT series Milady's founder Charlotte Fang also launched a fundraising campaign in June, announcing plans to release a Meme on the Ethereum chain called CULT, which raised over $20 million in just 7 hours, astonishing the market with its enthusiasm for Meme coins. However, no one expected the wait to last for nearly half a year.
And in the second half of the year, the aftershocks of these events will continue.
Second half of 2024: Internal troubles and external challenges with a wave of token issuance.
As we entered the second half of the year, with the Meme coin craze in full swing, the NFT sector once again welcomed its 'garbage time'.
Countless blue-chip NFT projects have disappeared from public view, with only a few NFT project founders like Pudgy Penguins and Weirdo Ghost Gang still active on platform X, keeping an eye on market movements and occasionally reporting on project updates and their views on industry developments.
Once again, the limited attention of people has been drawn back to NFTs by the once 'world's largest NFT trading platform' OpenSea—along with the 'crypto enemy' it faces—the U.S. SEC.
At the end of August, according to market news, NFT market OpenSea received a Wells Notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; becoming the next 'crypto project under scrutiny' after Coinbase, Lido, Bittrex, Uniswap, Robinhood. Taking this matter into consideration, we previously elaborated on the industry issues of NFTs in the article (OpenSea received SEC Wells Notice, is the NFT sector destined for failure?). The subsequent trajectories of many NFT projects also confirmed our earlier judgments.
As the industry continues to develop, NFTs have gradually become the 'identity certificates' and 'rights certificates' for many projects. The once significant 'IP carriers' and 'collectible values' have gradually been compressed, and the 'marketing effect' that many Web2 companies and brands pinned high hopes on has also yielded little result. However, the NFT sector has welcomed another wave of market expectations—that is, NFT platforms or NFT projects issuing tokens.
Apart from Blast, which is closely related to the NFT trading market Blur, multi-chain NFT trading platforms Magic Eden and the soon-to-be-released new version of OpenSea are also highly anticipated. NFT projects under Animoca Brands, blue-chip NFTs like Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, and Doodles are also among potential token issuance projects.
Thus, the NFT market is dragging its own garbage time while waiting and hoping for new prospects.
In September, at the WLFI crypto project launch, U.S. presidential candidate Trump attributed his changed attitude towards Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to the success of his NFT series.
At the end of October, renowned crypto artist Beeple remarked, 'NFT speculators have left the scene, leaving only core enthusiasts behind.'
In November, according to CryptoSlam data, in October 2024, NFT trading volume reached $356 million, a month-on-month increase of 18%, breaking a continuous seven-month decline. In addition, the total trading volume of NFTs also increased, with 7.2 million NFT transactions in October, a 42% increase compared to 5 million transactions in September.
At the beginning of December, as the market's patience was gradually worn thin, the long-awaited 'NFT project token issuance wave' had yet to arrive. What came first was the bad news that RTFKT, the studio behind the blue-chip NFT CloneX, which once had a floor price of dozens of ETH, would cease operations in January 2025.
But the market had no time to mourn or even grieve for it; immediately following was a wave of NFT projects issuing tokens that had been awaited for nearly six months—
On December 9, after raising over $20 million, the Meme coin project CULT initiated by Charlotte Fang, the founder of the NFT project Milady, finally officially launched, reminding people of NFTs again for a brief moment. For details, please refer to the article (CULT has officially launched, is the NFT relic issuing tokens a bull market ride or the final dance?).
On December 10, the ME Foundation announced that TGE has launched, and users can claim and stake ME tokens. To claim ME tokens, users need to load the Magic Eden mobile application and complete the claim. All unclaimed ME will belong to ME stakers.
On December 17, Pudgy Penguins officially announced that PENGU has been launched and is open for claiming. Eligible participants can start claiming PENGU, including holders of Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgys, Rogs, and SBTs. Holders have 88 days to claim, and all unclaimed supplies will be permanently locked/destroyed after the 88th day. For more information about Pudgy Penguins and the parent company behind it, please refer to our previous articles (Acquiring Frame, Creating Abstract Chain, and Disrupting Base, can Pudgy Penguins carry the banner of consumer economy?) and (With Pudgy Penguins about to issue tokens, can PENGU, Abstract, and OpenSea achieve a threefold benefit?).
It is worth mentioning that the reason Pudgy Penguins' token issuance received widespread recognition from market users is that it generously airdropped varying amounts of PENGU tokens not only to its own ecosystem but also to the Solana ecosystem, various other NFT series holders, and even Ethereum OG wallets.
At this moment, nearing the end of 2024, the suspense of token issuance in the NFT sector is gradually being revealed. Later entrants include OpenSea, which has registered a foundation in the Cayman Islands, and Azuki, whose founder claimed that 'Animecoin will combine vision, product, and real use cases, unlike other Meme coins', and even Doodles, whose founder hinted that the project is about to issue tokens. But whether they can replicate the wealth-creating miracle of Pudgy Penguins and PENGU remains to be seen.
Conclusion: When the narrative of NFTs is no longer appealing, issuing tokens becomes a double-edged sword.
Finally, from the perspective of industry data, according to CryptoSlam data, the total sales of NFTs in 2024 are estimated to be about $8.5 billion. Although this is far below the peak of previous years, the number of buyers has seen a rare increase of over 62%, reaching 7.5 million.
Although the narrative of NFTs is no longer as appealing as it was in 2022, capable of attracting millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars in investment at a time, it undoubtedly still occupies an indispensable position and role in the crypto market as a technical means. Of course, for NFT projects, issuing tokens is not always a profitable affair; rather, it is a double-edged sword: if the token issuance goes smoothly, the token price is reasonable, and the returns for market users are considerable or relatively satisfactory, that is naturally great news for everyone; but if an NFT project does not have a clear and comprehensive plan and sees token issuance as the 'last straw', then the final outcome is likely to be drowning in the water.
After experiencing a phase of high opening and low closing, or more accurately, low opening and low closing, the NFT market can now be said to have entered a rebound phase. Whether a new round of revival can be welcomed in 2025 still depends on the narrative direction, capital flow, and attention focus in the market.
But in any case, the story continues. NFTs are forever the endorphins stimulating the crypto market, and money never sleeps.
