Introduction

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are cryptographic assets on a blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other. Unlike cryptocurrencies, they cannot be traded or exchanged at equivalency. This differs from fungible tokens like cryptocurrencies, which are identical to each other and, therefore, can serve as a medium for commercial transactions.

NFTs are created through a process called minting in which the information of the NFT is published on a blockchain. At a high-level, the minting process entails a new block being created, the information of the NFT being validated by a validator, and the information being recorded. This minting process often entails incorporating smart contracts that assign ownership and manage the transferability of the NFT. As tokens are minted, they are assigned a unique identifier directly linked to one blockchain address. Each token has an owner, and the ownership information (i.e. the address in which the minted token resides) is publicly available. Even if 5,000 NFTs of the same exact item are minted (i.e. general admission tickets to a music festival), each of the tickets has a unique identifier and can be distinguished from one another.

Many invest in NFTs due to their financial potential, as reselling them has proven to be a lucrative path. The resale value of NFTs can be a substantial source of profit for investors. For instance, the initial buyer can buy low and sell high due to the immense resale value of these assets

during the past year (2022), the NFT ecosystem has experienced significant volatiles. firstly during the first months, the NFT ecosystem has gained high popularity and attracted many investors/holders/buyers to itself by after a while and especially because of market bearish situation and several crashes such as Terra (LUNA) and FTX and Alameda, the NFT ecosystem has lost its popularity as well as the popularity of the whole cryptocurrency market.

Last year, the NFT trends for 2022 has included easier onboarding, more virtual fashion, and tethering digital assets to physical items. For 2023, We can be hopeful that terms like digital access will replace terms like “NFT.” After all, 2022 saw brands as diverse as Nike, adidas, Tiffany, Gucci, AMBUSH, Louis Vuitton, Pharrell, Sean Wotherspoon, and KAWS drop web3 projects (to name a few).

Methodology

In this dashboard, I am going to provide some overall metrics of NFT sales and mints on Ethereum (the largest NFT ecosystem) during the year 2022. Here are some usefull data provided in this dashboard:

• An overall overview of NFT sales/mints in 2022.
• NFT project with the highest volume of trades in 2022?
• Which NFT project had the largest mint by dollar?
• Which NFT project decreased the most in value this year?
• Which NFT project gained the most value this year?
• What was the price of the highest-selling individual NFT?
• Which NFTs had the longest hold time this year?
• Which NFT project had the least amount of NFTs listed for sale on an exchange?
• Which project had the most NFTs listed for sale on an exchange?

For this purpose, the main tables that I am going to use are Flipside’s ethereum.core.ez_nft_mints (for mints), ethereum.core.ez_nft_sales (for secondary sales), ethereum.core.ez_nft_transfers (for transfers/holdings). Also, I am going to use

ethereum.core.dim_labels table in order to extract the actual title of NFT projects but since there are some missing data on this table, I have also searched some NFT Addresses manually on Etherescan in order to extract the NFTs titles.

Since we are going to analyse data for the year 2022, I have filtered our timespan to (=)2022-01-01 ~ 2023-01-01.

Morover, since there are various currencies for purchasing/minting NFTs, I have used price_usd column in order to show the actual $USD value of sales/mints.

According to the above data, during the year 2022, There were total 28,525,879 mint transactions done in Ethereum ecosystem made by 3,637,741 unique wallets that resulted in creating 158,493 unique projects and 3,676,296 unique tokens. also the total generated volume of mints during this year was $15,313,566,784.56.

On the other hand, we can see there were total 19,311,800 secondary sales on Ethereum during the past year made by 163,0106 unique purchasers. the total number of traded tokens in this year was 1,109,946 NFTs and the number of traded projects is 39,712 collections. moreover, there was total $52,894,101,873.8236 generated volume of NFT secondary saales on Ethereum.

So, with a comparison of these 2 actions (mints/secondary sales) we can say that number of mint transactions, minters, minted tokens and projects was more than secondary sales on 2022 but the total generated volume from secondary sales was almost 3.5x more than generated volume of mints.

Also, we can see that only almost 30% of minted tokens (25% of minted collections) were involved in secondary sales on Ethereum.

As mentioned earlier, as a proof, on the above charts we can see that volume of NFT sales/mints on Ethereum has decreased significantly as time went on. As we see, the highest peak of NFT sales on Ethereum (in terms of volume) was during the January 2022 but after a while and especially after May (Terra Collapse) the volume of sales/mints on Ethereum has decreased significantly.

But, this decreasing trend is not visible on Number of sales/mints and also number of minted tokens/projects. in these terms, we can almost see an increasing activity over time especially before September which shows the increasing activity of NFT sales and active users in this ecosystem during the past year.

Also, in the normalized %wise charts, we can see that the share of mints has decrased over time and on the other hand there is increasing share of secondary sales on Ethereum as time goes on. This means that Secondary sales has absorbed both number and volume of mint actions over time.

Based on the above charts, Opensea (as the largest NFT marketplace) has hosted more than 91% of total NFT trades on Ethereum ecosystem during the past year and was by far the most popular NFT marketplace in this ecosystem.

But in terms of volume, the interesting thing is that LooksRare marketplace has generated more volume than Opensea and all other marketplaces combined. more than 52% of total generated volume of sales during the past year was done on LooksRare marketplace and the share of Opensea marketplace in this ranking is 37.7%.

Uniswap V3 NFT positions has generated the highest volume from mints during the past year with a big difference from all other minted projects on this year. (On Uniswap v3, liquidity provider (LP) positions are represented as NFTs (ERC-721 tokens) as opposed to the fungible ERC-20 tokens on Uniswap V1 and V2. Based on the pool and users’ parameters selected on the liquidity providing interface a unique NFT will be minted representing users’ position in that specific pool.)

On the second rank, we have Curve SynthSwap with the highest generated mint volume. (Curve integrates with Synthetix to allow large scale swaps between different asset classes with minimal slippage. Utilizing Synthetix’ zero-slippage synth conversions and Curve’s deep liquidity and low fees, we can perform fully on-chain cross asset swaps at scale)

Anyway, If we exclude these position-related stuff, we can see that Pixelmon NFT collection have by far generated the highest volume from mints during the year 2022.

Now in terms of secondary sales, we can see that the NFT project “TerraForms” has by far generated the highest volume of sales during the year 2022. The second rank belong to the Meebits collection and on the next ranks we can also see some famous projects such as The Otherside, MAYC, Dreadfulz, Azuki and etc.

The NFT collection meebits has generated the highest sale volume in single transaction (most expensive sold project in 2022) and the most expensive sold token in this year is token ID #13824 from Meebits collection.

But, the average volume of sales on Fantasy islands - Sandbox collection is more than other projects and the median volume of secondary sales for Invisible Friends Specials collection was more than other projects.

Based on the left chart, the majority of NFT sales on Ethereum during the past year were done with $100 - $1000 volume. The second rank with a small difference belongs to the sales with less than $100 volume.

There were only 219 transactions that were done with more than $10,000,000 volume.

And according to the left data, we can see that the majority of NFT collections during the past year have totally sold $100 - $1000 volume in secondary sales and the second rank belong to the NFT collections with $1000 - $10000 volume of sales.

There were also 22% of NFT projects that have totally generated less than $100 volume from their secondary sales which can not be good and satisfying for them at all !

According to the above charts, More Loot collection has by far experienced the highest % raise in price during the past year (more than %440k growth in price!). on the second rank and with a low difference we have Gates Of Oxya - Colony NFT collection with %439k growth. In terms of gained $USD value, we can see Dreadfulz NFT collection has by far experienced the highest growth with more than $147k growth in its price.

On the other hand, we can see several NFT projects with more than 99% loss in their value during the peast year and the top one is the project: Friendsies

Totally, we can see that more than 52% of NFT projects have experienced loss in their value during the past year and there were 47.4% of NFT projects which have experienced growth in their value.

As an detailed view, on the right chart we can see that most number of NFTs have lost %75 - %100 of their value during the past year which is not good at all !

the main reason behind this failure can be because of NFT ecosystem and also the whole cryptocurrencmy market bearish situation.

According to the above data, the average holding time of NFTs during the year 2022 was 15.75 days.

Also Based on the pie-chart, the majority of NFT collectors in 2022 have only held their received NFT less than 1 week which shows the quite low loyalty of NFT collectors during the past year!

On the second rank, we have NFT collectors with 1 week - 1 month holding time.

Anyway, according to the right chart, we can see the NFT collection Metabad Donuts had the most loyal collectors during the past year since the average holding time of its collectors is 360 days (almost 1 full year)

On the left charts, we can see the majority of projects have sold 2-10 of their tokens on secondary marketplaces during the past year.

the second rank belong to the collections with 11 - 100 sold tokens and the 3rd rank belong to the project with only 1 sold token !

So, we can say that majority of NFT projects were not succesfull during the past year.

Anyway, on the right chart, we can see the project: ENS (Ethereum Name Service) has by far sold the most number of NFTs in 2022.

> The Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a distributed, open, and extensible naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. ENS's job is to map human-readable names like 'alice.eth' to machine-readable identifiers such as Ethereum addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata.

On the above charts, I have calculated the ratio of sold to minted tokens on NFT projects during the year 2022. As we see, the project Crypto Cloud Punks has by far the highest sold/minted tokens ratio. this means that these projects secondary sales is way more than their minted token.

On the other hand, we can see the project Phantom Network has by far the least ratio of sold/minted tokens and this means that these projects’ secondary sales is way less than their minted tokens.

On the left charts, we can see the ratio of sold tokens (secondary trades) during the past year to their total available tokens (all circulating tokens).

As we see, the majority of NFTs (almost 56% of all NFT projects) have sold less than %10 of their total available tokens during the past year. There also 2.99% of NFTs (1130 Projects) that have sold all 100% of their tokens during the past year in secondary sales.

On the above, we can see the top 3 NFTs of each month during the past year with highest volume of sales/mints over time.

And on the left chart, we can see the top 3 most expensive sold NFT projects on each month during the past year.

An Overview of NFTs Activity During The Year 2022

Monthly Over-Time Stats

Top Marketplaces

Top Projects (Mints)

Top Projects (Secondary Sales)

Projects With Most Gained/Lost Value in 2022

In this part, I have compared the median sale price of NFT projects on the first month of their launch vs their last sale price on the year 2022 in order to be able to extract their gained/lost value in 2022.

Holding Time of NFTs in 2022

Projects and Their Sold/Minted Tokens

Summary and Conclusion

According to the above analysis:

• The year 2022 was by far the most successful year of NFT ecosystem in Ethereum and the total mints and sale activity on this year was way more than other previous years. But anyway, during this year, NFTs have experienced high volatiles because of the market situation and especially because of several crashesh such as FTX, Terra, Alameda & etc. to the extent that the NFT sale volume has decreased significantly over time especially after May Terra collapse. However, the number of sold/minted tokens and also number of sales/mints have increased over time as time went on especially till September.
• The number and especially volume of secondary sales on Ethereum has totally absorbed the number and volume of mints on this ecosystem over time.
• the majority of NFT sales on Ethereum during the past year were done with $100 - $1000 volume. The second rank with a small difference belongs to the sales with less than $100 volume.
• There were only 219 transactions that were done with more than $10,000,000 volume.
• Opensea was by far the most popular NFT marketplace in 2022. however, the generated volume of sales on LooksRare platform was more than all other marketplaces.
• There were total 28,525,879 mint transactions done in Ethereum ecosystem made by 3,637,741 unique wallets that resulted in creating 158,493 unique projects and 3,676,296 unique tokens. also the total generated volume of mints during this year was $15,313,566,784.56.
• On the other hand, we can see there were total 19,311,800 secondary sales on Ethereum during the past year made by 163,0106 unique purchasers. the total number of traded tokens in this year was 1,109,946 NFTs and the number of traded projects is 39,712 collections. moreover, there was total $52,894,101,873.8236 generated volume of NFT secondary saales on Ethereum.
• So, with a comparison of these 2 actions (mints/secondary sales) we can say that number of mint transactions, minters, minted tokens and projects was more than secondary sales on 2022 but the total generated volume from secondary sales was almost 3.5x more than generated volume of mints.
• only almost 30% of minted tokens (25% of minted collections) were involved in secondary sales on Ethereum.
• The highest generated $USD volume from mints during the past year belong to the position-related stuff such as Uniswap v3 Positions, Curve Finance Positions and etc. But in terms of regular NFT collections, we have seen that Pixelmon mints has generated the highest volume.
• the NFT project “TerraForms” has by far generated the highest volume of sales during the year 2022. The second rank belong to the Meebits collection and on the next ranks we have seen some famous projects such as The Otherside, MAYC, Dreadfulz, Azuki and etc.
• The NFT collection Meebits has generated the highest sale volume in single transaction (most expensive sold project in 2022) and the most expensive sold token in this year is token ID #13824 from Meebits collection.
• The average volume of sales on Fantasy islands - Sandbox collection is more than other projects and the median volume of secondary sales for Invisible Friends Specials collection was more than other projects.
• The majority of NFT collections during the past year have totally sold $100 - $1000 volume in secondary sales.
• There were also 22% of NFT projects that have totally generated less than $100 volume from their secondary sales which can not be good and satisfying for them at all !
• More than 52% of NFT projects have experienced loss in their value during the past year and there were 47.4% of NFT projects which have experienced growth in their value.
• Most number of NFTs have lost %75 - %100 of their value during the past year which is not good at all !
• More Loot collection has by far experienced the highest % raise in price during the past year (more than %440k growth in price!)
• Dreadfulz NFT collection has by far experienced the highest USD growth with more than $147k growth in its price.
• There were several unsuccessful projects launched on 2022 and failed in the secondary sales and the top one with the highest loss in its value (more than 99.8%) was Friendsies.
• The average holding time of NFTs during the past year was only 15 days (almost ~2 weeks)
• The majority of NFT collectors in 2022 have only held their received NFT less than 1 week which shows the quite low loyalty of NFT collectors during the past year!
• The NFT collection Metabad Donuts had the most loyal collectors during the past year since the average holding time of its collectors is 360 days (almost 1 full year)
• The majority of projects have sold 2-10 of their tokens on secondary marketplaces during the past year.
• ENS (Ethereum Name Service) has sold the most number of its NFTs on secondary marketplace during the past year.
• So, we can conclude that there were so many unsuccessful NFT collections during the past year that have failed in selling their tokens in secondary marketplaces and also generating volume/income from their sales and their share is way too high to the extent that we can say there were a few number of NFT projects that have succesfully performed in this year.

Discord: Ali3N#8546 Twitter: Alik_110 Email: Alik110.72@Gmail.com

Based on the left charts, the year 2022 was the most successfull year of NFT ecosystem compared to the previous year. the number and especially volume of NFT sales in this year was way more than all other years combined.

Overall Comparison of NFT Sales/Mints in 2022 vs Other Years