Crypto users spent $2.7 bn minting NFTs in the first half of 2022: Report

New research by Nansen shows Moonbirds and VeeFriends Series 2 among the highest grossing NFT collections in the first half of 2022

By Shashank Bhardwaj

Image: Shutterstock

New data published by the renowned crypto data firm Nansen shows that about a million different wallets have used the Ethereum blockchain for the minting of NFTs in the first half of 2022. The stats further show that around 963,227 ETH were used to mint a large collection of NFTs on the open platforms. The largest NFT minting platform turned out to be Opensea.io. Besides that, the BNB blockchain and Avalanche saw NFTs minted on them worth around $107 million and $77 million on Avalanche, respectively.

Nansen said in a tweet, "1/ Market participants spent 963,227 $ETH (approximately $2.7b) on minting NFTs in the first half of 2022. So what did the NFT projects do with the money they raised?”

According to the report, BNB and Avalanche together contributed to over 263k unique wallets on the platform. The cumulative pricing of the whole collection of NFT assets crossed well over $2.7 billion, which is a huge number as compared to previous encounters.

Many NFT collections have been launched in the year's second quarter but have not seen a very high value in minting. The data shows that the top five NFT collections on the Ethereum blockchain were responsible for around 8.4 percent of the total minting.

Ethereum chain saw more than 28k NFT collections minted on it in the year's first half. Just over half of the NFT collections on the ETH chain clocked less than or equal to 5 ETH. At the same time, around 140 NFT collections raised more than 1000 ETH.

The data suggests that only half of the money raised was connected with the NFT collections post transaction. The other half was wired to non-entity wallets here and there, which could not be traced further. These transactions have been recorded for the direct transfers only, and thus there can be no assurance of the first half either. The highest grossing NFT collections on ETH blockchain were Pixelmon-Generation 1, Moonbirds, VeeFriends Series 2, Genesis Box, and World of Women Galaxy. The second half of 2022 looks pretty optimistic for the crypto market and NFT minting.

It is worth noting that earlier, Nansen published a research article to track the flow of Ether (ETH) raised through the primary sales (i.e., the minting of NFTs) of NFT collections. The study showed that 52.3 percent of the ETH raised from the NFT primary sales were being circulated to non-entity wallets.

The writer is the founder at yMedia. He ventured into crypto in 2013 and is an ETH maximalist. Twitter: @bhardwajshash

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