NFT Prices Are Still Lagging Behind Ether's Gains
Crypto is inching toward bull-market territory, but non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have failed to benefit from the market euphoria. While ether (ETH) is up approximately 70% year-to-date, NFT valuations aren't following. Nansen's NFT-500 index, which measures the valuation of the top 500 NFTs, has dropped 50% year-to-date when denominated in ether and 16% in dollar terms. The Blue-Chip 10 index, which measures the valuations of the most prominent NFTs.
OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, hasn't fared much better. At the height of NFT mania in January 2022, the platform was clearing $387.48 million in fees every month and $120.45 million in revenue, according to data from DeFiLlama. "NFTs have survived their first market cycle and have yet to take on a new jumping point in technology to usher in more user interest, like DeFi had with Uniswap's AMM," Nick Ruck, the COO of ContentFi, a decentralized IP-focused content financial ecosystem, said in an email interview. "Many new innovations are still being built to increase the use cases of NFTs, but it's also partly due to the fact that NFT prices are generally negatively correlated with the USD price of ether."
