For blockchains supporting smart contracts, the leading driving force over the past couple of years has been the directions of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-interchangeable tokens (NFT). In 2021 alone, each of these segments of the cryptocurrency market has grown by an order of magnitude: DeFi to $180 billion, and NFT to $25 billion.
However, the crisis of this year led to a large-scale exit of investors not only from the financial, but also from the cultural sector. The daily turnover of NFT decreased to the figures of June last year: 16 thousand tokens and $ 13 million.
A bright spot in the statistics is the release in May of a new collection from Yuga Labs, whose bored monkeys continue to hold the top of the monthly rating with a turnover of $58 million in June. Three weeks ago, one of the pictures was sold for 1024 ETH or $1.17 million. For all the same time, the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection boasts a turnover of $2 billion and the third place in the overall standings after cryptopanks and Axie animals.
The release of a new collection with land plots in the Otherside metaverse led to a short-term surge in commissions on the Ethereum network in May, but the trend for their decline has persisted, and now you need to pay less than $3 per transaction.
This is the level of August 2020.
More than 90% of all NFTs are minted on Ethereum, and Yuga Labs previously noted that it will continue to use only this network for its collections. The advantage of Ethereum over younger and faster competitors is the highest level of security and stability. For example, in Solana, you need to pay less than a cent for the commission, but at the same time, over the past 10 months, the network has fallen seven times with a complete stop of transactions.
Declining interest in NFT and DeFi makes Ethereum less in demand. On the one hand, this leads to cheaper commissions, and on the other hand, the coin loses its investment attractiveness against Bitcoin.