WSJ Report Says 'NFT Sales Flatlining,' But Data Shows Another Story

A Wall Street Journal article that suggested that the NFT market is collapsing has not been received well in the crypto community. The article claimed that sales of non-fungible tokens are "flatlining," but a deeper analysis of data is more comforting investors.

The article published Tuesday cited data from the NFT market analysis platform Nonfungible, suggesting the number of NFT sales has fallen by 92% since an all-time high in September 2021.

The WSJ article also noted that the number of active wallets in the NFT market fell 88% to about 14,000 last week from a high of 119,000 in November.

“The NFT market is collapsing,” the article said.

However, going by data from on-chain data provided by Dune Analytics, the NFT market is still robust. The platform has information showing that NFT users and transactions are much higher than what’s reported by Nonfungible.

Tom Schmidt, partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital, called out the WSJ analysis, citing OpenSea transactions and USD volume.

CoinMarketCap quoted data from DappRadar that suggested demand for NFTs hasn't plunged as low as the newspaper states. It further said that over the past week, 150,000 unique wallets interacted with OpenSea's smart contracts over the past week which happens to be 10 times more than what NonFungible's data indicated.

A CoinTelegraph article noted that the misalignment in data could be due to the inclusion of sales volume from the play-to-earn (P2E) game Axie Infinity by Nonfungible.

Quoting CryptoSlam data, the article said, "Volume for the popular play-to-earn hit an all-time high of over $40 million on November 4, 2021, before a gradual decline to its current levels of around $500,000."

It is unclear why there has been a mismatch in data. While NFT popularity might have dipped a bit in the recent time, industry experts believe that "flatlining" would be a too strong word for that.