Back in September 2021, the Alonzo upgrade opened the door for smart contracts on Cardano. At the time, the community was quite excited about NFT being introduced on the platform.
In the early days, the Cardano team tried to test the implementation. However, it has not gained much traction, as users still depend on other blockchains such as Ethereum , Solana , and Polygon to trade their jpeg collections.
However, Cardano is currently in a much better position. While the aforementioned blockchains still hold the top spots alongside ImmutableX and BNB Chain, Cardano has been able to rise above Arbitrum, Flow, Ronin, Avalanche, Fantom, Algorand, Cronos, and Tezos by handling high transaction volumes. more than in the past month.
While the gap between the numbers for Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon appears to be quite large for Cardano at the time of writing, it is only a few million different from BNB Chain ‘s numbers .
On Cardano, the number of NFT buyers has dropped by about 17% over the past month. In fact, on a quarterly basis, this has dropped from 2.8k to 2.1k. On the other hand, the number of sellers has increased from 86 to 123. According to a recent report by Messari:
“Daily NFT transactions are down 27% qoq and daily unique buyers are down 23%. The drop in activity is not only due to fewer unique buyers, but also to fewer average transactions per buyer. On the other hand, the number of daily sellers has increased by 43%.”
ImmutableX has been giving Cardano fierce competition. The Messari report highlights:
“In Q4 2022, Cardano was the fifth largest network by NFT secondary sales with $40.5 million. On some days, Cardano generated more secondary sales than Immutable X, which ended Q4 as the fourth largest network by secondary sales with $56.7 million. However, Cardano’s secondary sales volume fell 18.6% to $35.8 million in Q1 and Immutable X declined, growing 18.7% to $66.3 million.”
During the same period, the average secondary NFT selling price on Cardano was $85.84, much higher than competing NFT networks like Flow ($17.65) and WAX ($2.62). Due to the above striking difference in average selling price, Cardano leads chains like Flow and WAX in the NFT sell volume rankings.
