It’s been a tough year for the NFT market, with nonfungible tokens struggling amid a crypto winter. The entire market is down by nearly every trackable metric, and monthly NFT sales value remains deep below peaks seen in 2021. But, the total sales value in 2022 has still increased year-over-year.
According to data presented by Crypto Presales, global NFT sales value jumped by 10% year to $21.9bn in 2022.
Sales Value Increased by $2.1B YoY
While 2021 welcomed high-value NFT sales, soaring cryptocurrency prices, and an influx of new investors, 2022 has seen trading slow, and crypto prices drown in the aftermath of extended crypto winter.
But, thanks to strong trading activity in the first half of 2022, the annual NFT sales value increased by $2.1bn year-over-year.
According to NFT aggregation site CryptoSlam, the total NFT sales value in the first six months of 2022 amounted to $17.8bn, showing a mind-blowing 4,920% increase compared to the same period of 2021, when the market saw only $356 million worth of sales.
However, trading activity significantly slowed down in the second half of 2022, resulting in a total NFT sales value of under $3.5bn. This represented an 80% drop year-over-year from $17.4bn worth of sales in the second half of 2021.
Statistics show April 2022 was a peak month for NFT trading activity. That month alone, global NFT sales value hit almost $3.8bn. After that, it declined for six straight months before falling to $460 million in October, the month with the lowest sales value in all of 2022.
Total Number of Transactions More than Doubled to 78.5 million
Besides a 10% increase in total sales value, 2022 also witnessed a considerably higher number of transactions in the NFT market. According to CryptoSlam data, around 78.5 million NFT transactions took place in 2022, more than twice the number seen a year before. The total number of transactions in 2021 stood at 34.8 million, with January as a peak month counting 7.2 million.
That is 2.3 million less compared to January 2022, as the top month for NFT transactions last year. That month alone, the NFT market recorded around 9.5 million transactions. November was on the other side of the list, with less than half that number, or 4.1 million transactions.
