Will 2022 be a year of smiles and grimaces for non-fungible tokens (NFTs)? The year started well for the latter, especially for Axie Infinity, but the figures of the last few months seem to show a declining sector.
Axie Infinity down: at minus 70% of peak
The Axie Infinity blockchain play has benefited well from the 2021 NFT boom. Axie Infinity’s NFT sales actually topped $3 billion, while total non-fungible token sales – across all projects – crossed $12 billion this year, according to data from Nonfungible.com.
Sales of NFTs during the week of December 20, 2021, totaled $297 million. While these numbers seem large in absolute terms, weekly sales have actually been experiencing a significant decline for the past three months.
On December 28, 2021, the Chinese journalist known as Wu Blockchain on Twitter confirmed this decline in his tweet, citing Nansen’s data in particular. These show a drop in “daily transaction volume on Axie Infinity and Ronin blockchains and daily sales of Axie NFT” to mid-July 2021 levels. Ronin is the Ethereum (ETH) sidechain created specifically for Axie Infinity, so that Axie Infinity users can trade, buy or pay for NFTs without paying a gas fee for sales.
Critics’ victory: the NFT bubble is over?
This data indicates a drop in sales volume not only for Axie Infinity, but for the entire NFTs industry itself. Is the NFT hype coming to an end? Have non-fungible tokens created a bubble that is gradually deflating? Critics of NFT projects will certainly defend these hypotheses. The other possibility is that the sector has simply entered a new phase, before a stabilization of the markets or a bullish recovery.
Even if the industry recovers in 2022, Axie Infinity will certainly have to deal with a growing number of competitors, although it is possible that one or more competitors will be able to take a significant share of the market.
The future of NFTs lies partly in the development of existing metavers and the emergence of new ones, with perhaps other major players following in the footsteps of big-name brands like Adidas by launching their own non-fungible tokens.
