Has the NFT market really plummeted?

The Wall Street Journal believes the NFT market is collapsing, given data provided by the website NonFungible. But cryptoevangelists have pushed back on the piece, saying the WSJ founded its arguments off incomplete data.

Why should we care?
Both realities can be true simultaneously—that parts of the NFT market are withering away, while other pockets are growing and succeeding. The Wall Street Journal’s statistics suggest a serious decline in NFT sales since September 2021—a 92% decrease—while the Nansen Blue Chip-10 Index tracking the top 10 NFT projects is up 81% in the past year. We’re witnessing a consolidation in the NFT space, much in the same way that the crypto space writ large has seen big players succeed the most (despite rhetoric of crypto “democratizing” wealth). In tandem, these findings confirm what we’ve already known: that NFTs are a highly volatile digital asset, and, despite the hype, individual NFTs can’t promise runaway returns. One buyer purchased an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet on Twitter for $2.9M in March 2021, and received at best a $14,000 when he attempted to resell the NFT (he declined the sale). But, at the same time, Yuga Labs, which runs the Bored Ape Yacht Club series of NFTs, raked in $300M over the weekend in a new NFT sale. The NFT landscape isn’t “flatlining,” then, as much as becoming more institutionalized and centralized.