Ethereum: NFT winter continues even as bulls gear up 

Ethereum NFTs’ monthly sales volume has plummeted by more than 40%. Despite this, ETH gains some upward momentum.

• Though the NFT trade count dropped, ETH NFTs’ trade volume in YSD increased.
• ETH was up by 2%, but selling pressure was increasing. 

The Non-fungible Token [NFT] summer, when NFTs witnessed a boom in both volume and price, is now long gone.

Regardless, Token Terminal’s latest tweet pointed out that private market interest in NFT marketplaces might be picking up—could Ethereum [ETH] lead the NFT market again?

Are Ethereum NFTs regaining traction?

It’s important to take a look at Ethereum’s performance over the last few years. Inasmuch, IntoTheBlock’s 15 October tweet highlighted a few notable metrics.

Notably, in 2021, NFTs were the main driver behind Ethereum’s fee burns. Now, they contribute only 8%. Although gas fees were at their lowest since September 2020, making NFT transactions and mining cheaper, user interest appeared unchanged.

A similar trend of declining interest in ETH NFTs was also noted in CryptoSlam’s data.

Moreover, ETH NFTs’ sales volume plummeted to $137 million in the last 30 days, which was a decline of over 44%. The total number of transactions dropped by nearly 60% last month, establishing the fact that investors were not trading NFTs.

Complementing the data, ETH NFTs’ total sellers and buyers also declined by 2.5% and 0.5% respectively, in the last month.

In fact, Santiment’s data revealed that ETH’s total number of NFT Trades Count also plummeted over the past four weeks. However, it was surprising to see that, despite this drop, Ethereum’s Total NFT Trades Volume in USD spiked quite a few times lately.

Hence, considering the aforementioned datasets, the possibility of ETH NFTs gaining traction like the last NFT summer anytime soon seemed unlikely in the near term.

Not only Ethereum, but BTC NFTs, known as Ordinals, also witnessed a declining trend. As per Dune Analytics, the number of Weekly Inscription Counts plummeted sharply over the last two months – a concerning sign.

ETH is turning bullish

Despite ETH’s suffering NFT ecosystem, the token’s price gained some upward momentum. According to CoinMarketCap, ETH was up by more than 2% in the last 24 hours. At the time of writing, it was trading at $1,586.87 with a market capitalization of over $190 billion.

The good news was that the uptrend was accompanied by a more than 83% hike in trading volume, acting as a foundation for the price surge.

However, investors might have been selling their holdings after the price surge, which was evident from the rise in ETH’s Exchange Reserve. Additionally, CryptoQuant’s data revealed that selling sentiment was dominant in the Futures market, as its Taker Buy Sell Ratio was in the red.

This could cause a trend reversal in the coming days.