Introduction

Since the initial launch of the Flow blockchains, it has majorly revolved around the NFTs, and while the increase in their market cap made them a mid-cap blockchain, their focus has remained on NFTs. However, it still has a long way to reach the likes of Ethereum and Solana. Considering that, it was more logical to compare Flow with other mid-cap blockchains and saw how its NFT ecosystem performs compared to theirs. As a result, the NFT sales of Flow have been compared with four other chains, including Polygon, Avalanche, NEAR, and Algorand over the past 3 months. In addition to the analysis of the overall metrics and their daily sales, their top collections with the highest sales volume have also been analyzed during that period.

Conclusion

The comparison of NFT sales of Flow and four other mid-cap blockchains, including Polygon, Avalanche, NEAR, and Algorand has demonstrated although Flow has the lowest market cap among the five evaluated chains, its NFT ecosystem has been much more active compared to the others, accounting for nearly 70% of the total sales volume over the past 3 months. While NFTs on Flow dominated the sales, the second and third places are divided between Polygon and Avalanche NFT collections. Interestingly, Avalanche has had the most expensive NFTs, and Flow NFTs have been moderately cheap compared to the others, indicating their massive number of sales resulting in Flow’s high sales volume. From the NFT collections perspective, four sports-centric collections, especially NBA Top Shot and NFL All Day have dramatically dominated the sales over the measured period, while having relatively cheap prices among the top collections. Overall, while the NFT sales on Flow have been on par with Ethereum’s and Solana’s, it has been massively higher compared to other top blockchains. One can conclude that Flow is all about NFTs, and it keeps continuing to climb the charts.

Methodology

Flow is considered a mid-cap blockchain in terms of its current market capitalization, thus comparing it with large-cap blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana does not produce meaningful and useful insights. The reason is the fact that, based on a recent NFT ecosystem comparison of Ethereum Vs. Solana conducted by the author, the order of sales volume is completely different between those two and other blockchains. As a result, the NFT sales activity of four other mid-cap blockchains with a higher market capital compared to Flow, including Polygon, Avalanche, NEAR, and Algorand were chosen to be compared with this blockchain.

The required data for the NFT sales analysis of Flow and Algorand were simply selected from their nft_sales tables. The NFT sales data of Polygon were extracted from its fact_event_logs and fact_transactions tables with the implementation of various filters, as described in a previous dashboard of the analysis of Polygon NFTs conducted by the author. The same method was incorporated for the NFT sales data on Avalanche as well. For the NFT sales on NEAR also, the methodology utilized in a previous dashboard of the analysis of NEAR’s Arts District conducted by the author was used. Since the data for some of the selected blockchains are still in light mode, the last 3 months were selected as the time frame for the analysis.

To unify all the sales volume into U.S. dollars, different tables were used for different blockchains. To obtain the price of MATIC and AVAX, which were filtered by their token address, the data on the fact_hourly_token_prices table of Ethereum’s core schema was used. NEAR and Algorand had their own prices table and the price of the NEAR token and ALGO were simply extracted from the fact_prices table of NEAR’s core schema and prices_swap table of the Algorand database, respectively. On the hand, multiple tokens, ranging from Utility Coins with $1 in value, Stablecoins with also $1 in value, and the FLOW token are used for the NFT sales on the Flow blockchain. Since the value of all of the tokens, except FLOW, have been in USD, and also the majority of sales with a share of more than 99% of the total have been registered with the DapperUtilityToken, the minor number of sales with the FLOW token were also summed up with the sales of other tokens in USD. The error margin was considered negligible since the price of the FLOW token has been between 1-2 USD during the measured period.

Analysis

• The comparison of NFT sales of 5 mid-cap blockchains has demonstrated the Flow dominance on all the metrics, even though its market cap is the lowest among the five;
• Flow has had over $50M in its NFT sales volume accounting for nearly 70% of the total share. Avalanche has had the second highest sales volume with only $12M, which shows the difference between the chains;
• In terms of the number of sales, the Flow dominance has been more explicit with a share of more than 80%. Although Algorand has taken the lead among the other 4 blockchains, the NFT sales share of all of the non-Flow chains has been in a similar range;
• Polygon has had a larger share in terms of the number of NFTs that were sold and the number of unique buyers with a 21% and 11% share, respectively.

Daily Averages

• Similarly, Flow has had the highest average number of sales, number of buyers, and volume of sales per day compared to other blockchains;
• While the average sales/day on Flow has been around 20 times higher than the others, its average buyers/day has been around 10 times the other blockchains;
• The average sales volume per day of each chain has increased in a more step-wide manner and the difference between each chain has been more distinct;
• Interestingly, the average price of NFTs in Avalanche has been much higher compared to other chains, indicating its NFTs are more expensive. The NFTs of Flow and Algorand have sold in a similar price range, while the NFTs of Polygon and NEAR has been much cheaper compared to the other chains.

Daily Sales

• The daily NFT sales volume chart has shown continuous fluctuations in the sales activity of all of the chains;
• Although the sales of Flow and Polygon have had a slight upward trend, the sales of Avalanche have decreased, while the sales of Algorand and NEAR have stayed relatively the same over the past 3 months;
• In general, the daily NFT sale activity on each chain has been aligned with their total values;
• Quite interestingly, one might conclude that the daily NFT sales on the five measured blockchains have not been correlated with the overall crypto industry and they have operated in their own bubble.

Collections

• The analysis of the top 30 NFT collections has demonstrated that more than 75% of the sales volume and the number of traded NFTs have been on Flow;
• While Avalanche and Polygon both have had a volume share of around 20% combined, Polygon has been solely responsible for the 20% of the total number of sold NFTs;
• The sales volume of different collections has demonstrated that NBA Top Shot and NFL All Day have had a sales volume of around $20M each during the past 3 months;
• Besides those two collections, the Pack NFT and UFC NFT collections have been the 3rd and 4th largest collections with the highest sales volume;
• After these 4 sports-centric collections, the rest of the collections generally belongs to NFT collections from Polygon and Avalanche;
• Interestingly the average price of the NFTs from the top Flow collections has been considerably lower compared to other collections, especially from Avalanche and Polygon, which indicates their incredibly higher number of sales compared to others;
• The number of buyers also has been higher for the top 4 NFT collections on Flow, indicating their huge fan base compared to other Web3-specific collections.