Introduction

NEAR protocol, as a frontier of Web3 technology, provides creators, developers, business owners, and individuals to use its protocol infrastructure to be able to leave their legacy in the digital world through NFTs. They can bring their ideas and projects to the NEAR ecosystem by utilizing its low gas fees and fast transaction throughput.

Paras is one of the most active non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces for digital art cards in the NEAR ecosystem. Similar to the art galleries and trading card publishers that exhibit and publish selected works, Paras takes a curatorial approach to the output of its artists to ensure consistency in quality and the elevation of the creators.

In this analysis, the state of NFTs on the NEAR blockchain has been evaluated since the beginning of the year using the Paras marketplace data.

Methodology

The required data for the analysis of NFTs on NEAR protocol were selected from the fact_transactions table of the core schema of the near database, especially by using the JSON content of the tx column. The start of 2022 to the current date was selected as the time frequency of the analysis. By analyzing the NFT Activity on Paras based on their NFT series functions, and subsequently checking the logs of transactions on the Near Blockchain Explorer, different events were selected as indications of NFT mints, sales, and transfers. These events were filtered using the tx column.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the analysis of the NFT ecosystem on NEAR protocol has indicated that while the sales activity was high during the first months of the year, it considerably dropped to lower levels in recent months. The minting data of new collections have demonstrated although the ecosystem has slowed down, the creators have continued to create new collections. Interestingly, the average price of both mints and sales has been quite low compared to NFTs on other blockchains.

Mints Analysis

The analysis of the NFT minting since the beginning of the year has demonstrated that more than 120K NFTs from around 230 collections have been minted by nearly 15K minters. The average mint price of 1.1 NEAR has resulted in a total mints volume of 235K NEAR since the start of the year. The daily analysis of the minting has indicated that although there has been a steady flow of capital into new minting every day, there were periods with high volume which can be directly attributed to the launch of particular collections. The number of mints and the number of minters had been higher during the early months of the year and began to decline since mid-April.

Sales Analysis

The sales analysis of NFTs from the beginning of the year has demonstrated that 441K NFTs have sold to 28K buyers with an average price of around 0.4 NEAR. These sales have generated a total volume of 174K NEAR during the period. The daily analysis of the sales has indicated that there had been a massive activity during the first quarter of the year. Since April, although there had been days with a spike in both volume and the number of sales, the overall trend has been to the downside and the sales have decreased since then.

The analysis of minting of top collections with the highest volume has shown that the RocketBois, El Cafe Cartel, and The Undead Army (images from left to right) have generated the highest volume during their mint. These three collections in addition to the Ugly Apes Society collection have had more than 1000 minters.

Transfers Analysis

The analysis of NFT transfers has indicated that 5K NFTs from nearly 70 collections have been transferred in more than 55K transactions during the measured period. More than 6.6K senders had been involved in the transfer of those NFTs. The daily analysis of transfers has demonstrated that the majority of transfers have started since March and there was not much activity during the first 2 months of the year. The number of transfers had been high between March and May, and it has decreased since the beginning of June.

The analysis of top NFT buyers has shown that while the majority of the buyers spent a substantial amount of capital in their purchases, their average purchasing price of quite low. It is worth mentioning that among these top buyers, only three of them have bought more than 1000 NFTs while others have less than 500.