But are they buying the dip or hedging in the bear market?
The price of ETH continues to fall, but NFT enthusiasts are seeing value in blue chip collections as everyone finds a way to weather the storm. The past 24 hours have not been kind to most people with crypto and NFT holdings. But if you do your research and look at the numbers, there are opportunities to trim your losses.
Summary
This week, making money is not the main priority for crypto enthusiasts and NFT collectors. Trimming our losses so that we don’t lose too much is the short-term objective. The goal in the medium term is to put yourself in a position to prosper when things turn around and this bear market becomes a thing of the past.
ETH’s dollar value is down 20% over the past 24 hours. The almighty BTC is down 12% in the same period. Terra’s struggles are all over the news and the platform’s LUNA token has plummeted a staggering 97% in a day. At the time of writing, it sits at a lowly $0.03, having started the week at $65.
Amid the bad news, there are people finding ways to minimize the damage, and some are finding solace in the blue chip NFT collections. These have also suffered drops in dollar price, which is unsurprising given how turbulent this week has been. But they’ve not gone down by as much as the cryptocurrencies have. And for this reason, they can work as a safer store of value than the falling coins.
CryptoPunks
- Collection size: 10,000
- 24 hour drop in average sale price: 12.5%
- Current average sale price: $126,480
- Trades in past 24 hours: 29
- Trading activity in the past 24 hours: Increase of 314.3%
- Link to collection
Perhaps the safest of the blue chips, CryptoPunks was launched by Larva Labs on Ethereum in June 2017. On March 11th, 2022, Yuga Labs acquired CryptoPunks and immediately handed full commercial rights of the NFTs to their holders.
People minted CryptoPunks for free, paying only the Ethereum gas fees which were small at the time. Since then, prices have certainly gone up. Shalom Meckenzie made CryptoPunk #7523 the most expensive one when he purchased it at Sotheby’s for $11.75 million.
The reason CryptoPunks are so expensive is all to do with rarity and heritage. It’s a true OG collection and even predates the implementation of the ERC-721 token standard. This means it’s an NFT that existed before NFTs were even developed. For any collector to hold a Punk is still so desirable that even in a true bear market, they can still maintain value.
Doodles
- Collection size: 10,000
- 24 hour drop in average sale price: 15.6%
- Current average sale price: $39,350
- Trades in past 24 hours: 117
- Trading activity in the past 24 hours: Increase of 34.5%
- Link to collection
As with CryptoPunks, the average sale price of Doodles has dropped. Also similarly to CryptoPunks, the average sale price for Doodle NFTs has not dropped as far in the past 24 hours as ETH has. This means that if you’d bought a Doodle 24 hours ago, you would have lost less money than if you’d kept hold of the cryptocurrency and watched it depreciate.
The same is true over the past seven days. The dollar value for Doodles NFTs has dropped by 15.6% over the past week whereas ETH has gone down by 33.4% in the same period.
Doodles launched on October 17th, 2021, so they’re not a legendary collection in the vein of CryptoPunks or CryptoKitties. But the project did come from the brains of three artists who were involved in the latter, who have looked to empower the Doodles community from the very beginning. It’s this level of commitment from its dedicated fanbase that has helped to maintain Doodles’ value during this difficult period.
Bored Apes
- Collection size: 10,000
- 24 hour drop in average sale price: 13%
- Current average sale price: $225,870
- Trades in past 24 hours: 37
- Trading activity in the past 24 hours: Decrease of 41.3%
- Link to collection
Despite all metrics being down for the Bored Apes Yacht Club project, the average sale price for the NFTs has not fallen as far in the past 24 hours as the price of ETH. The Bored Apes are probably the most well-known NFTs outside of the blockchain community so it’s no wonder that they’ve held their value relative to the ETH drop.
Bored Apes launched on April 23, 2021 and has a long list of celebrity holders. Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Madonna, Neymar, Eminem and Steve Aoki are some of the people with an Ape in their wallet. Even with the 13% drop in the average sale price and a floor of $181,410, Bored Apes are still out of reach for the vast majority of people. Things will need to get a lot worse for most people to be able to afford one.
It’s interesting to note that trading for Bored Apes has fallen by 41.3% which suggests that the community is hodling for now. This could be because trading volume and sale prices were both high in the run up to the Otherside land mint and now people are reluctant to sell their NFTs at a massive loss. We’ll be keeping an eye on Bored Ape trading activity over the next few weeks to see how things shake out.
Some of the larger collections that have lost value relative to ETH
Mutant Apes
On-chain analytics for Mutant Ape NFTs are down across the board. The average sale price is slightly lower than the drop in ETH price, down 22% compared to ETH’s 20%. The collection of 20,000 is an off-shoot from the Bored Ape collection and shares many of the strengths of its older sibling.
It has a strong community, it has celebrity fans, it has great PR and marketing. But it’s also not as rare and not quite as highly sought after. Probably for these reasons, its value has dropped by more, and more people are selling them off. In the past 24 hours, 172 trades have taken place for Mutant Apes against only 37 for Bored Apes.
Clone X
The average sale price for Clone X NFTs is down 32.4% over the past 24 hours. This represents a far larger drop than ETH in the same period and is one of the biggest drops among the bigger collections.
The Clone X project is made up of 20,000 next-gen avatars and comes from a collaboration between designer Takashi Murkami and RTFKT studios. Across every on-chain metric, the collection has fallen. The overall value of Clone X has dropped by 32.2% to $430.54 million, which represents a dollar value loss of $205.79 million in 24 hours.
Azuki
We should also mention the Azuki NFT collection. The average sale price is down 26.9% over the past 24 hours but the floor price is up 10.6%. With very little discrepancy between floor price and average sale price, it looks like most people are trying to get rid of their Azuki while they still can. It also seems like some people are sweeping the floor in the hope that their value will go up in time.
Unfortunately for Azuki, there are other reasons that the value of its NFTs has dropped, which you can read about here.
Smart tactics in tough times
We don’t know for sure whether collectors are buying up blue chip NFTs as a hedge against fallen crypto value, or getting their hands on them while they’re momentarily more affordable. It’s probably a mix of the two, but it seems like a smart move by the blockchain community’s most experienced investors to cut their losses where they can and ride out the storm.
Here at DappRadar we’ll be keeping a very close eye on our NFT rankings and analytics pages to see which collections are able to survive. We’ll also be paying attention to the prices of cryptocurrencies and hoping that some of those red numbers turn to green.
Stay tuned to our blog as we bring you the latest news and tune in to our podcast Off the Blockchain every Thursday at 4pm UTC where we discuss everything from NFT projects to DeFi and the metaverse.
