2024 is almost over. At the end of 2024, the airdrop of Magic Eden’s token $ME and the collective recovery of Ethereum’s “old blue chip”, especially the sunny airdrop of Pudgy Penguins’ token $PENGU, have brought real wealth effects to NFT. It has gained market attention for a long time.
What kind of year has it been for NFTs? Rhythm BlockBeats reviews the NFT market over the past 12 months for you. After reviewing the NFT market in 2024 with us, how would you rate the performance of the NFT market in 2024?
January: The world is divided into three parts, and the end of the "hexagonal head"
In December 2023, Solana NFT’s total monthly trading volume was approximately $365 million, completing a slight surpass of Ethereum’s approximately $363 million. Looking back, this was the beginning of the NFT world dominated by Ethereum, Solana and Bitcoin (Ordinals). Although at the end of the year, Ethereum has once again proved that it is still the king of the NFT industry through its absolute monopoly on the top market value NFT projects and the volume of players. However, if the time goes back to January this year, 2024, the NFT market We have to spend this whole year in a situation where the world is divided into three parts.
Ethereum NFTs kicked off the year with a “retro Mickey Mouse.” Because U.S. law only allows for 95-year copyright ownership, in January this year, the copyright of the old version of Mickey Mouse was no longer owned by Disney and became available to the public. So we saw “Mickey Mouse” dominating the rankings on OpenSea.
Image source: OpenSea
But then came the bad news – Twitter removed the ability to use NFTs as Twitter avatars. This seems to be telling us that except for Crypto players, no one in the world cares whether an avatar is worth 10 yuan or 100,000 yuan. Anyway, do you remember this "hexagonal head"?
Source: X
This month’s star 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 rebuilt the glory of the Ethereum mainnet.
ittybits (Ether Inscription), the 10 times opportunity in the niche track, has driven the rise of the entire Ether Inscription small picture, but it is a pity that there is no follow-up.
CryptoUndeads (Solana), obtained the Cabal disk that made a lot of money in pre-sale, like a shooting star.
February: ERC-404 “Pandora’s Box”, Yuga Labs acquires “Moonbird”
The concept of “coin-to-image integration” became a big hit in early February. The first project of ERC-404, “Pandora’s Box”, was the absolute star without a doubt, and it skyrocketed nearly 30 times.
Source: Pandora
At that time, we had this idea——
ERC-404 directly creates a "symbiotic relationship between graphics and currency", which can not only be traded on CEX, but also subvert existing NFTfi products. As long as the oracle is introduced, native NFT leverage based on ERC-404 will be easy (directly open long and short on ERC-20 Token), and direct borrowing will also be easy, and it is no longer a form of saving small pictures to a specified address. , can be operated directly based on ERC-20 Token.
But now, this idea has not actually been realized. Instead, it is the Hybrid "token-to-coin hybrid" model that became popular on Solana. That is, the rise of meme coins drives the rise of the NFT series with community cult attributes, showing the effect of a double helix of liquidity. .
In February, Yuga Labs announced the acquisition of PROOF, the development team of Moonbirds. It owns top NFT IP/projects such as CryptoPunks, BAYC, MAYC, BAKC, "Monkeyland" Otherdeed, Meebits, Moonbirds, etc., becoming an NFT "Big Mac". At that time, our point of view was——
Yuga Labs is no longer cool. There may not be much time left for Yuga Labs to think. This will be a race against the bull market.
Now it seems that the attention and excellent market performance received by Pudgy Penguins and Doodles at the end of the year provide evidence for this view.
This month’s star new projects include:
Quantum Cats (Bitcoin Ordinals), although the selling price of 0.1 Bitcoin at the time caused some divisions in the market, the current price of 0.3 Bitcoin has made the project’s status as a blue-chip Bitcoin NFT undisputed.
March: Blast mainnet goes online, Runestone airdrop triggers rune craze
The Blast mainnet was launched on March 1, marking the “first shot” of the NFT market in March. But overall, the lively scene this month is Bitcoin Ordinals.
The first is the rise in the concept of “DMT (a concept that derives from a generative art based on Bitcoin block data)” that began at the end of February. As a leader in the DMT concept, Natcats set a single sales record of 1.3 Bitcoins before any Bitcoin NFT trading market was listed.
Source: X
Then came the Runestone airdrop that took place in mid-March. This huge airdrop contained more than 112,000 Bitcoin addresses. In just two days, it became the third NFT series in terms of total market value among all chains. It was also the precursor to today’s#1rune, $DOG.
Image source: BlockBeats
The Runestone airdrop has a profound impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem. "Free, fair, and big truck." These three keywords have become the criteria for judging whether the Bitcoin Ordinals ecological project is excellent for a long time this year.
Meanwhile, on Solana, Mad Lads reached their peak this month, with holders happily awaiting the arrival of their Wormhole airdrop.
Overall, it was a lively month, but there was still some depressing news. Starbucks’ NFT loyalty reward program “Starbucks Odyssey” on Polygon announced that it would be shut down at the end of this month, and Kevin Rose also caused controversy for selling a bunch of small pictures.
This month’s star new projects include:
Runestone (Bitcoin Ordinals), the stone from which the Rune Saga begins.
CENTS (Bitcoin Ordinals), 10,000 penny tokens that are smelted and put on the chain, have become the art series with the highest market value on Bitcoin.
Plutocats (Blast), much like the “Nouns” on Blast, have soared due to receiving much higher Blast Gold allocations 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 has paid attention to it.
April: Bitcoin halving, Base NFT grows
Among the star new projects in March, it should also include the Open Edition series "MUTATIO" released by XCOPY on Base. During the 2-day minting period, 1.023,831 copies were sold, with total sales exceeding 700 Ethereum.
Image source: BlockBeats
But what is hot is the rise of the meme token $FLIES, which was launched by the project community in April, after being forwarded and recommended by XCOPY himself.
On the Blast network, fantasy.top, the "buy and sell friends" game, continues to be popular.
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 stabilizing and improving, but in the end, this epic Satoshi did not allow players to get a good return rate, and it was even a failure...
This month’s star new projects include:
Blob (Bitcoin Ordinals), a self-funded airdrop, an all-star lineup to open the game, and also took the lead in winning Epic Satoshi. Just when everyone was expecting a new Bitcoin blue chip to appear as a generative art, it collapsed due to a series of cunning operations and a hand of Tianhu. This might be one of the most disappointing Bitcoin NFT investments of the past year.
Prometheans (Bitcoin Ordinals), the first attempt of the CyberKongz team to enter the Bitcoin ecosystem, was a successful airdrop, but then they failed in the sales of the PFP series, and then dropped the No. 2 rune DECENTRALIZED and left. Bitcoin Ecosystem.
May: The beginning of the deserted period
Starting from this month, NFTs in 2024 began to enter a relatively deserted stage.
There is really not much to say this month from the degen level of fighting on the chain. The news is basically stuff like Pudgy Penguins toys making their way into the stores of US retail giant Target, DeGods returning to Solana, and more.
The best performer this month has been Milady, bucking the trend.
June: deserted, miserable and miserable
This month we saw CryptoPunks under 30 Ethereum. This is the first time since August 2021 that CryptoPunks’ floor price has fallen below 30 Ethereum.
Image source: BlockBeats
In addition, Three Arrows Capital spent a total of about 140 Ethereum in August 2021 and March 2022 to purchase a complete set of gold skins BAYC + 2 MAYC + BAKC, a total of four Yuga Labs NFTs, which were auctioned at Sotheby's on June 18. . At the peak of NFTs, the price of this asset should have been more than 1,000 ether. In June, BAYC’s floor price once fell below 9 ether.
It can be said to be the darkest moment for NFT. It wasn’t until the last week of June that established Ethereum blue-chip NFT projects saw a rebound. CryptoPunks bounced back 24%, $BAYC bounced as much as 30%, Pudgy Penguins bounced as much as 50%, and Azuki bounced as much as 35%. Solana’s top Mad Lads also rose by 40%, and top Bitcoin projects NodeMonkes and Bitcoin Puppets also rose by more than 20%.
There was another NFT project that became popular due to LayerZero’s airdrop in June, and that was Kanpai Pandas. The market's dissatisfaction with the LayerZero airdrop spread to this project. There were voices 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. Abstract’s predecessor, Frame, is an NFT Layer2 chain. Since the airdrop pre-claim period was extended on January 30 this year, the official push has fallen into silence. It was not until the end of June that Frame finally made a big move - the chain was acquired by Igloo, the newly established parent company of Pudgy Penguins. At this point, all three brands in the Igloo ecosystem have been unveiled - Pudgy Penguins, the on-chain IP authorization platform Overpass, and Frame.
Frame undergoes a 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 large-scale adoption of Crypto.
Looking back, the fire after the cold winter began to ignite from this moment on. In addition to Abstract, there are some star new projects in June:
Writ of Passage by The Beacon (Arbitrum), total quantity 10,000, minting price 0.115 Ethereum, sold out 7 minutes after entering the FCFS round. Under the market environment at that time, it was really rare to sell 10,000 NFTs at such a price. Of course, this one was sold out mainly because it essentially took out the tokens for pre-sale.
Gigabud (Solana), the public price at that time was 1.25 $SOL. As the official PFP of Grass "WiFi Grass", this series not only brought a considerable number of airdrops, but also could be sold at a price above 1.25 $SOL after the airdrop, which is very comfortable.
End of the year: direct recovery to fever
The few months I didn’t write in between were not because I was lazy, but because there was really nothing worth writing about. A few things happen during these gaps:
Magic Eden confirmed that it will issue coins, and finally at the end of the year, $ME’s airdrop gave NFT players generous returns.
Azuki confirmed that coins will be issued.
NFTs have become increasingly popular since mid-year as a means of cold-starting many projects. What was popular at the time was the Free Mint project with a total supply of 1,000 or less, which directly stated that there would be token airdrops in the future. By the end of the year, we saw Kaito on fire.
On the Solana network, a series of NFT rises driven by the popularity of meme coins blurred the boundaries between memes and NFTs. The most typical representative is Retardio Cousins.
After the Ape chain became popular for a while, the low Mint price led to some projects with high multiples, but in terms of the amount of income, there were no cases that shocked the market.
Everyone is deeply impressed by what happened at the end of the year. OpenSea’s token issuance is already on the way. Abstract, Monad, Berachain, and Story are chains that have not yet issued tokens, because potential token airdrops have made related NFT projects popular $ The wealth creation effect of the PENGU airdrop has caused Doodles, Azuki and even Cool Cats to soar. New star projects are beginning to appear, such as Abstract’s On-chain Heroes and Fukuhedrons on the Bitcoin network.
After a long absence, spring has returned to the earth, but only one old blue chip has sadly left the scene, and that is Clone X. This old blue chip with a Nike background announced that it would cease operations on December 3, which shocked all NFT players just like announcing at the New Year’s Eve dinner that he would never eat again.
Looking forward to the new year, Abstract's mainnet will be launched in January, and new opportunities may also appear for Monad, Berachain, and Story. I just hope that you will not go online too tightly. Diversion is not friendly to degen.
On the basis of the steady improvement of the old blue chip of Ethereum, although it is difficult for Ethereum to have a project that can compete with the old blue chip (the investment and resources of the old blue chip are really hard to imagine that there will be investors who will make great efforts to catch up with the old blue chip in the future). ), but the new narrative may bring new opportunities, such as AI-related NFTs.
More and more currency issuance projects may choose NFT, which is a small amount and easy to control, as a preheating 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 version standards for screening new projects. "Coin issuance" disks and "conspiracy" disks have become mainstream, but this does not prevent us from still discovering what we like and Love the high-quality content, NFT is still growing.
Maybe the concept of NFT is outdated, but the thing we like to play with has never changed, it has always been pictures.
My words are finally finished. Now, where would you rate the NFT market in 2024?
This article is reprinted with permission from: (Blockbeats)
Original author: Cookie
『2024 NFT market review! These JPGs don’t want to leave the market yet, and they will recover and become hot at the end of the year." This article was first published in "Crypto City"
