According to Dune analytics, the new and still very niche bitcoin NFT market is on a tear, with the chart of new inscriptions and trading fees going parabolic. So far, according to a table published by Ordinals Global, the top 30 ranking bitcoin NFT Ordinals collections racked up a total of more than 2,807 bitcoin in total sales volume. This is more than $76 million at current bitcoin prices.
More than $5 million has been paid to miners in fees and so far there are more than 1.6 million inscriptions.
The increasing activity in the bitcoin Ordinals NFT market looks to have come at a time when volume in the Ethereum NFT market has been dipping. Indeed, it seems to be at the point of crashing.
So far this year, the Ethereum NFT market has been bolstered by significant volume on the Blur exchange marketplace, which was in turn driven by token incentives against trading volume. As the May 1 deadline for the token claim draws near, more traders are abandoning Blur.
Trading volume on the marketplace has decreased by 90% from its peak on February 22 and as of yesterday, stood at 6,509 ether. Meanwhile, OpenSea registered around 3,000 ether in sales.
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The Ethereum NFT market has also been hit by a number of large companies curtailing or abandoning their NFT plans. Most notably, Meta completely shuttered its plans for Instagram integration with NFTs. Meanwhile, the hype around its up-and-coming rival is set to increase as a new category of bitcoin NFT has been released this month.
Bitcoin STAMP NFTs contrast with Ordinals as they are directly stamped on the transaction rather than being a prunable part of a transaction. Coders are even re-creating classical games such as Doom and Tetris as bitcoin STAMPS that will be forever stored on the blockchain.
Since the start of the year, bitcoin is up 60% and ether by 48%. The NASDAQ index is up by 16%. Meanwhile, as the volume in the Ethereum NFT market dries up, its traders seem to be exiting the market with huge losses.