From Thibault LAUNAY – Founder of www.exclusible.com a premium NFT platform for luxury brands.
The NFT market has witnessed a dramatic increase in value over the last few years. The market cap has increased almost ten times from 2018 to 2020, and in 2020 alone, its value increased by 299%. However, the market movements are just as wild as cryptocurrencies as demonstrated in the transaction volume of different categories of NFT and the NFT market size in the same category. For example, transactions started growing for arts while declining in gaming.
Part of the digital asset market is crypto arts otherwise known as NFT arts. They are digital arts that are minted on the blockchain to prove ownership and provide authenticity. In digital arts, the proof of ownership through authentication depends on NFTs that give each art its unique digital signature. This means it can’t be reproduced but can be purchased using cryptocurrencies. NFTs can be minted for virtually any asset ranging from tweets to artworks. Once minted, an NFT becomes unique and the original copy can be traced back to its owner despite several copies of it shared infinitely.
NFT: The stats
The most popular stat is the NFT art of Beeple called “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” which was sold for $69M in 2021.
Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash minted the first NFT in 2014.
The technology for NFT has been around since 2012.
Jack Dorsey who founded Twitter sold his first-ever tweet for $2.5M.
In 2018 the market capitalization for NFT was almost $41M, which more than tripled in 2019 to almost $142M. By 2020, the market cap was $338.04M.
2021: A defining year for NFTs
In 2021, the NFT craze reached a new level, and that even saw the emergence of Re-Fungible Tokens (RFTs) as NFT became more popular. Many view 2021 as a defining year for NFT and we look at some of the key moments in 2021 that have helped boost the adoption and popularity of NFT.
2021 saw an increase in digital arts as NFTs.
Popular NFT marketplace OpenSea made more than $100M of sales in NFT in the first quarter of 2021.
Celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan among others started minting NFT.
Popular brands like Formula 1 have also joined the NFT bandwagon to start minting their NFTs.
List of the top NFTs by value
At the top of any compiled NFT list, you are going to find Beeple record-breaking art sales. It is yet to take a beating for the number one spot. There are other NFTs with staggering prices that we will look at in this list.
CryptoPunk #7523 sold for $11.7M is the second most expensive NFT at Sotheby’s.
CryptoPunk #3100 sold for $7.58M is the third most costly NFT to be sold.
CryptoPunk #7804 sold for $7.57M is the fourth most expensive NFT.
Another Beeple artwork called Crossroads sold for $6.6M.
Then we have the most expensive NFT representing a tweet from Jack Dorsey that sold for $2.5M.
Many more NFTs are fetching staggering sums, those mentioned above are just a few of them.
Conclusion
NFT needs to continue gaining traction to improve adoption. At the moment, it looks like users will continue exploring the potential of NFTs, especially artists seeking a new ground to launch their work. It seems a perfect way to gain exposure for their work and experiment with new things. NFTs will continue to cut across several industries and it remains to be seen how far this technology will go.28
