What is an NFT?

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are ownership certificates stored on a blockchain and backed by blockchain technology (e.g. Ethereum) that are often associated with a digital asset such as visual arts, videos, music or collectibles. Unlike fiat money or cryptocurrencies, which can be easily replaced and substitutable, each NFT is unique or “non-fungible” and cannot be deleted or counterfeited.

Overview

This dashboard compares the profitability of NFT creators on royalties vs mints during 2022. It is divided in four sections:

NFT sales current market situation
Creator’s profits from NFT sales fees
Creator’s profits from mints
Comparison between the two

Key Findings

Ethereum has seen some progressive slow decrease in the number of collections sold since the beginning of the year. Even though Ethereum has many already established collections, not many of them have been able to keep up with the expectations of the previous bull run.
Even though on average a collection raises 218k USD on creator fees, the fees volume distribution chart above shows that most collections earn 50 or less USD. However, the first number comes from the top 10 collections raising inmense amount and increasing the most common creator fees earnings.
Most NFT creators set a creator fee around 5.74%. This means that for every sale in the collection, this percentage is given to the creator.
Despite Meebits being the collection with the highest sales volume, that was due to a small amount of NFTs (533) being sold at extremely high prices. For that reason, this collection is not in the top 10 projects by creator fees volume. On the other hand, the otherside is the most profitable NFT collection on Ethereum from sales creator fees, with 47.8M USD.
The total amount that NFT creators have earned from minting during 2022 is 12.71B USD, which is 12 times more than what they have earned from creator fees on the secondary markets.
The majority of projects collect less than 10k USD on mints.
3 out of the top 10 most profitable collections by creator fees in sales were free to mint.
Among the top 10 projects by mint volume, only the azuki collection was more profitable from creator fees than from minting.

Ethereum’s volume (and thus the average sales price) only held strong until May 11th. This was because that was one of the craziest weeks in crypto history, due to the collapse of the UST stablecoin and Terra's LUNA governance token. LUNA, previously a top 10 coin by market cap, fell 99.9999% at a fraction of a cent, and UST, designed to hold at $1, went down to less than a cent in a matter of days. This situation created a lot of panic in the crypto market and most cryptocurrencies crashed around a 30%-60%. Since then, there has been a lot of fear in the market (especially for wallets with large amounts of funds). Thus, many people sold their NFTs as soon as they saw what was coming (May 9th) while many others decided to wait for the market to turn bullish again to sell their NFTs in profits.
The number of NFTs sold on Ethereum during the week of May 9th was much lower than any other week of the year due to the UST/LUNA crash. There was also a big market crash during the week of June 13th, where ETH’s price went from 1.8k USD to 1k USD in a matter of days.

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Ethereum has seen some progressive slow decrease in the number of collections sold since the beginning of the year. Even though Ethereum has many already established collections, not many of them have been able to keep up with the expectations of the previous bull run.

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Even though the total number of NFTs sold per collection is 3340, the weekly chart oscilates around 225 NFTs/collection. This means that there is a large variety of collections being bought week after week.

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On average, the number of NFTs sold per wallet is 18.14 NFTs.

The large majority of NFT collections have a sales volume between 0 and 1k USD. The second largest group have a volume between 10k and 100k USD.

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There are more projects with over 5M USD volume than projects between 5k and 10k USD.

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The tokens with the highest volume by far are ETH and WETH, with 97.7% of the total volume.

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Meebits is the NFT collection with the highest volume (9.6B USD) on Ethereum. It has had 21.16k sales with an average sale price of 454k USD.

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The otherside collection is the projects with the highest number of sales among the top 10 projects by sales volume, and it has had many different sellers. It was a very hyped project when it launched, and many NFT traders tried to take advantage of this.

The total amount of fees profited from NFT creators on Ethereum is 1.1B USD.
On average, every collection has raised 218k USD on creator fees. However, this is not what most collections usually earn, as this metric is highly pumped by the top collections.
It can also be seen as earning an average of 65.5 USD per NFT.

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Most NFT creators set a creator fee around 5.74%. This means that for every sale in the collection, this percentage is given to the creator.

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Since the market crash during the week of June 13th, the fees earned by the creators through sales have been decreased (mainly because the floor price of most collections has gone down).

Even though on average a collection raises 218k USD on creator fees, the fees volume distribution chart above shows that most collections earn 50 or less USD. As mentioned above, the first number comes from the top 10 collections raising inmense amount and increasing the most common creator fees earnings.

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ETH has gained importance in creator fees volume compared to WETH with an 87.6% compared to a 12.9%.

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Despite Meebits being the collection with the highest sales volume, that was due to a small amount of NFTs (533) being sold at extremely high prices. For that reason, this collection is not in the top 10 projects by creator fees volume.

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On the other hand, the otherside is the most profitable NFT collection on Ethereum from sales creator fees, with 47.8M USD.

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However, the boredapeyachtclub is the collection with the highest NFT profit return amongst the 10 projects, due to a lower number of sales compared to the others.
The collection with the highest creator fee is rtfkt, with a 10% fee.

The total amount that NFT creators have earned from minting during 2022 is 12.71B USD, which is 12 times more than what they have earned from creator fees on the secondary markets.
Despite this, there have been twice the number of collections sold than minted.

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However, the number of NFTs sold vs minted is not that disparate (19.2M to 16.3M NFTs).

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If a collection turns out to be good, minting is much profitable than buying from the secondary markets. That is reflected in the average NFT price (780 USD/mint and 2610 USD/sale).

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There are 50% more minters than sellers, mainly because not every user pretends to sell all their minted NFTs, but some want to hold them.
The number of collections minted has been decreasing since the beginning of the year, but the number of NFTs minted has not really followed the same pattern (it has had some more volatility).

The majority of projects collect less than 10k USD on mints.

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Most of these are done using Ethereum’s native token.

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The collection with the highest mint volume this year was pixelmon., which raised 75.9 MM USD, with every NFT being minted for 7.9k USD.

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Moonbirds is the second most profitable collection for NFT creators with 59.5M USD.
However, among this 10 projects, ens stands out the most as it is the one with the highest amount of mints (by far), which are done at a very low price (25 USD) compared to the others. This is Ethereum’s naming standard.

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There are 3 projects that were discarded from this top 10: uniswap, curve finance and short squeeth. The reason behind this is because the average volume is not the NFTs mint value, but the cross-asset swaps, liquidity pool (LP) positions or short ETH positions respectively. Thus, they were not considered in this top selection.

Conclusions

Ethereum has seen some progressive slow decrease in the number of collections sold since the beginning of the year. Even though Ethereum has many already established collections, not many of them have been able to keep up with the expectations of the previous bull run.
Even though on average a collection raises 218k USD on creator fees, the fees volume distribution chart above shows that most collections earn 50 or less USD. However, the first number comes from the top 10 collections raising inmense amount and increasing the most common creator fees earnings.
Most NFT creators set a creator fee around 5.74%. This means that for every sale in the collection, this percentage is given to the creator.
Despite Meebits being the collection with the highest sales volume, that was due to a small amount of NFTs (533) being sold at extremely high prices. For that reason, this collection is not in the top 10 projects by creator fees volume. On the other hand, the otherside is the most profitable NFT collection on Ethereum from sales creator fees, with 47.8M USD.
The total amount that NFT creators have earned from minting during 2022 is 12.71B USD, which is 12 times more than what they have earned from creator fees on the secondary markets.
The majority of projects collect less than 10k USD on mints.
3 out of the top 10 most profitable collections by creator fees in sales were free to mint.
Among the top 10 projects by mint volume, only the azuki collection was more profitable from creator fees than from minting.

Methodology

The data used in this analysis was collected by combining the information on the ez_nft_sales and ez_nft_mints tables of the core schema of the Ethereum database.

As mentioned above, 3 projects were not taken into account when obtaining the top 10 projects by mint volume: uniswap, curve finance and short squeeth. The reason behind this is because the average volume is not the NFTs mint value, but the cross-asset swaps, liquidity pool (LP) positions or short ETH positions respectively. Thus, they were not considered in this top selection.

The top charts compare the profitability of royalties and mints of the top 10 projects by fees volume and mint volume.

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3 out of the top 10 most profitable collections by creator fees in sales were free to mint.

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From the other 7, 4 of them were more profitable from creator fees in secondary markets, while 3 were actually more profitable from mints.

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Among the top 10 projects by mint volume, only the azuki collection was more profitable from creator fees than from minting.