Yahya 
The memecoins and the fall in the crypto market combined to a 44% decline in NFT sales in Q2. Projections show that may climb once again later in the year 2024.
The investment head of Apollo Crypto in its Q2 report said that a mix of celebrity, political, and animal themed memecoins together with the negative market might have caused a 44% drop of sales in NFTs.
Impact of Market Conditions and Memecoins
Part of a larger industry downturn, data from CryptoSlam reveals NFT sales dropped from $4.14 billion in Q1 to $2.32 billion in Q2. Chief Investment Officer of Apollo Crypto Henrik Andersson said, “Q2 was a challenging market with Bitcoin declining by 15% and many altcoins performing significantly worse.” He also claimed that memecoins are probably diverting customer attention from NFTs. Based on CoinGecko statistics, memecoins saw enormous trading volumes even when NFT sales have fallen; $3.4 billion in the last 24 hours alone. This surge has been spurred by new celebrity tokens on Ethereum and Solana as well as rising PolitiFi memecoins connected to the presidential race in the United States. Among the memcoins that gained value in Q2 are MAGA (Trump) and Pepe.
This Might Interest You: Buterin Criticizes Bitcoin Regulation
Future Prospects for NFTs
Advances in Bitcoin-based Ordinals might potentially cause focus to veers away from conventional NFTs. Given several Bitcoin layer-2 solutions already on the market, Andersson pointed out that Bitcoin Ordinals might keep grabbing market share in the NFT domain. However, the activity in the networks especially for Ordinals and Runes has declined lately; Rye’s transactions decreased by 88% since June. NFTs reached over $3 billion in sales in the fourth quarter of 2023, so there was a rebound that might indicate a later half of 2024 rebound. Alone in December 2023, the sales volume reached $1.77 billion, the highest since NFT summer which declined in June 2022.
As per the CoinGecko records, CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Clubs are among the best NFT collections, and they have assets of $994,9 million for CryptoPunks and 345,9 million for BAYC. Thus, NodeMonkes and Bitcoin Puppets projects are two of the largest Ordinals projects, with market capitalizations of $121.1 million and $94.2 million.
Click here to get the latest news from Coin Engineer!