NFTs and crypto, data from Coingecko’s new report

Coingecko discusses the performance of the NFT and crypto market in Q1 2022 in its latest report.

Coingecko, the performance of the crypto sector

The cryptocurrency and NFT market appears to be on a downward trend in Q1 of 2022, following large year-end declines from the highs of November 2021. 

This is the first clear finding from the Q1 report published by crypto and blockchain analytics firm, CoinGecko.

From November’s record highs that saw record figures of $3 billion in total capitalization, the market would have lost over $1 billion, only to return slightly above $2 billion in capitalization.

The share of the top two coins, Ethereum and Bitcoin, remained largely unchanged, with Bitcoin’s capitalization accounting for around 47% of the market and Ethereum’s for 21.4%.

Of the top five cryptocurrencies by capitalization, only Bitcoin and XRP showed some signs of holding up compared to the widespread and generalized market declines in the first quarter of the year. 

Solana and BNB were the two highly-capitalized cryptocurrencies that performed the worst. Luna bucked the trend among the top ten cryptocurrencies by gaining 24.1%.

Amongst the lower-capitalization cryptocurrencies, Waves posted a resounding result, rising more than 250%. According to CoinGecko’s data, the stablecoin market went up 13%. 

Tether continues to lead the sector in terms of capitalization, although its share has declined slightly, mainly at the expense of USDC, BUSD and UST.

NFT market data

In early 2022, Ethereum’s competing blockchains continued to gain ground especially in the DeFi and NFT space. 

During the first months of the year, there has been a decline in the NFT sector, and now this also seems to be confirmed by the fact that the overall TVL (Total Value Locked) has shrunk by 9% to $177 billion.

Ethereum’s share of TVL would amount to around 54%, down from 61% in December 2021.

As for NFTs, a large part of the report is dedicated to a survey that was done by the company mainly targeting users in the APAC region, where the NFT market has shown more signs of growth in recent months. 

Of the 871 respondents, around 72% own NFTs, while more than half have five or more NFTs. Meanwhile, the majority of NFT owners come from the 18-30 (43.6%) and 30-50 (45.2%) age groups.

35% of the survey participants would be involved in the GameFi industry, which is inextricably linked to Non-Fungible Tokens, which were supposed to be a revolution in terms of revenue generation and in-game involvement. So far, it seems to have failed to meet the expectations of analysts and industry experts. 

Most of the investors surveyed would have invested between 1% and 25% of their portfolio in NFTs.

Interestingly, almost 50% of the people who invested in Non-Fungible Tokens would profit from this. As far as the market is concerned, after a marked downturn in February, the market has recovered in March, even if it does not seem as tonic as at the end of the year. 

A clear proof of this is the total failure of the auction of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, put up for sale by Sian Estavi, who only a year ago had paid $2 million for it. Estavi tried to capitalize on the news of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, but the highest bid did not exceed $7,000.