Introduction

In every city, on every continent, art is something that allows people to express themselves beyond words and actions. It is a crucial fundament of every culture and has its roots as deep as the Neanderthals, who more than 65,000 years ago, were making strokes in red ochre on the walls of caves. 65 centuries later, we are able to express our visions and ideas in a much more advanced way, in form of NFTs. In this dashboard, I will explore how does the picture look like for NEAR - which marketplaces are thriving the most, how many NFTs are being sold on a daily basis and what NFT projects users are interested in the most. As a bonus, I will also look into those metrics for my favourite NEAR NFT project, which sadly is not very popular but extremely cute! 😸

Data for this dashboard is set to refresh daily. 🤩

Art has always been a part of humanity - look at how much has changed in those years!

The most popular NFT Marketplaces on NEAR are the following:

• Paras
• Mintbase
• UniqArt
• Apollo42
• Few and Far
• Seatlab.

Each one of them offers a very similar product, with different service fees or minting tools. Some of these marketplaces haven’t launched yet - such as Few and Fear or Seatlab. In a later section of this dashboard, I will explore which collections are thriving the most on ……..

Firstly, time for some analysis! Let’s start by looking at the fundamental metrics, namely how many buyers/sellers there are on NEAR daily, and how much users are spending on those NFTs!

Key points:

• The general interest in NEAR’s NFTs seems to be declining - we can see that the total number of transactions has been decreasing since about April this year. This is what we would expect in a bear market though; users are scared of the markets crashing and therefore don’t want to invest in NFTs. It looks like there is a lot of hope for NEAR, and once the bear market is over, the NFT-side of NEAR should recover quickly too!
• The sales volume is quite large, we can see that at the peak, users spent over 64k NEAR on NFTs - which is not a small number!
• By looking at the daily numbers of buyers and sellers, it is quite interesting to see that there are always more buyers present on the marketplaces than there are sellers. What does this mean exactly? It means that on average one seller will make more than one sale, which is also good news for the artists.
• The averages tell us that the NEAR’s NFTs aren’t very expensive. We can see that the highest average price for one NFT was 39.6 NEAR on September 19th 2021, but has now decreased quite significantly - with the average price lately being between 6 and 15 NEAR.
• We can also see that the averages are higher for buyers than for sellers on most days - which means that buyers are more likely to buy more expensive NFTs.

Next up, totals - llet’s look at the all-time values for NEAR’s NFTs!

NFT Projects

NEAR offers a huge variety of NFTs: there are cute bears, even cuter cats, bad rabbits, pixelated creatures and skulls… but which one of these are the most popular projects? Let’s find out!

Key Points:

• We can see that the biggest number of transactions can be found on Paras, which is one of the most popular NFT marketplaces on NEAR. It is not necessarily an NFT project itself, but this analysis is an analysis of the most popular contracts, and it is not surprising that a marketplace is the top one.
• We can also see that the rest of the projects have somehow had a similar number of transactions, such as Kokumo KongZ with over 5k transactions or NEARNauts with almost 5k transactions.
• The biggest sales volume is seen again, on Paras. When it comes to the individual projects, we can see that the Antisocial Ape Club is the winner here - it’s quite surprising to me that one NFT project managed to be so successful on multiple blockchains - everyone knows how famous Antisocial Ape Club is on Ethereum!
• The average price per NFT per project tells us which projects have been the most expensive. We can see that users spend the most, on average, on Antisocial Ape Club and on Secret Skellies Society.

Next, I will look into some of the projects to see what art they have on offer! 🎨

Dive into projects

First up, Kokumo KongZ. These pixelated, scary-looking, colour-full gorillas gained users’ interest by their dangerous looks and the promise to protect the $NEAR Protocol - a pretty cool concept!

NEARNauts offers 7777 randomly generated Nauts, each with a slightly different outfit and accessory. Users can use the artist’s website to check the rarity of their NFT, which creates a sense of competition between users - after all, who doesn’t want to have the rarest NFT?

Antisocial Ape Club is a collection of 3333 pixel art apes, with each ape having a different colour and accessory. Similarly to NEARNauts, some apes are rarer than others, making users want to get the rarest one out of them all!

==Bonus==: My favourite NEAR NFT project!

I quite like the katknippp.near project - probably because of my endless love for cats! Even though these NFTs don’t cost a lot (the starting bidding price is less than 1 NEAR), I think their cuteness needs no explanation! Sadly this project doesn’t seem to be popular at all - let’s look at some of the total values for Moji Cats.

Conclusion

This deep dive into NEAR’s NFTs has shown us both: the more fundamental metrics, such as the daily number of transactions or the daily sales volume, as well as the more insightful side, namely which projects users interact with the most. We have seen that users love the Antisocial Ape Club, as well as Kokumo KongZ and NEARNauts - and we have seen how different each project is. Whether it is the mission to protect the NEAR protocol, or just to be an extremely cute-looking mochi-cat, NEARs NFTs have it all! 💙