December 2020 is a new record for the blockchain-based art market, with the trading volume of non-fungible token-based (NFT) works approximated to $8.2M.
CryptoArt tracks many metrics across major NFT art marketplaces like Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, MakersPlace, Async Art, and KnownOrigin. Among them, Nifty Gateway is leading the race, with around $6.67M worth of crypto artworks sold last December. It is then followed by SuperRare, which has seen a trading volume of around $1.12M last month.
Remarkably, December’s figures show a sharp surge, unlike November. This can be explained by the ongoing price rally in all crypto markets.
December has seen the highest number of active monthly collectors so far – 414 compared to 258 in November.
NFT art’s Uprising
NFTs contain identifying information recorded in the smart contracts. This idea makes every NFT different and unique as well as not interchangeable and scarce. If an artist “embeds” his work into an NFT, it will still be one-of-a-kind as such.
Crypto art based on NFTs has boomed in 2020, together with its prices. Last July 2020, “Picasso’s Bull,” a crypto artwork by Trevor Jones, was sold for a record-breaking $55,555 on Nifty Gateway.
In December, one investor paid $777,777 for a collection of digital art by Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann – with a second on the clock left. In total, Beeple’s art sale has raised $3.5M; at some point selling $582,000 worth of art in five minutes.
Some sales in 2020 have seen a piece of a virtual F1 race track auctioned for $223,000 while another collector paid $65,000 for a Kylian Mbappe trading card in a blockchain-based football game.
“The NFT space has been on a meteoric rise over the last year and we viewed a sale like this as inevitable. It may have been one of the firsts of its kind, but it certainly won’t be the last,”
Tommy Kimmelman, head of artist relations at Nifty Gateway
As the market develops, innovations are piling up; for instance, Singapore-based platform NIFTEX enables users to create ERC-20 tokens that represent the fractions of NFTs, which can be traded on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap.
It seems like the NFTs will have a brighter future in 2021.
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