Updated as of 4:30pm UTC: Ilan Rakhmanov, founder and CEO of ChainGPT, has provided a comment on the matter.
Sales figures this week indicate a resurgence in Ethereum-native nonfungible tokens (NFTs). On February 12, Wrapped Ether Rock #46 was sold for $496,658, followed by the sale of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) #1726 for $668,297, according to NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam. These transactions mark the second and third highest sales of the month, with the highest sale being the $1.53 million purchase of CryptoPunk #5363 on January 31.
According to Anndy Lian, an intergovernmental blockchain expert and author of the book “NFT: From Zero to Hero,” Wrapped Ether Rock and BAYC are not just NFTs, but also represent a symbol of prestige within the NFT community.
While the sale of BAYC #1726 appears to have been a strategic move, Ilan Rakhmanov, founder and CEO of ChainGPT, suggests that the sale of Wrapped Ether Rock indicates a different trend in the market, as he explained to Cointelegraph.
Over the past seven days, Ethereum’s NFT sales volume has increased by 99.42% to reach $159.5 million. This growth is primarily driven by a 25% increase in sales from the Nobody collection, which generated $8.76 million in weekly sales. In contrast, Bitcoin’s NFT sales declined by 25% to $47.5 million during the same period.
Yehudah Petscher, NFT strategist at CryptoSlam, notes that NFT traders are shifting their focus back to Ethereum after a surge of interest in Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions and Solana-native NFTs.
Contributing to the increase in Ethereum’s sales volume, the floor price of the Pudgy Penguins collection reached a new all-time high of 21.5 Ether (ETH) ($53,427) on February 10, before retracing to the current price of 20.28 ETH ($50,395). This price is 13.1% lower than the floor price of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which stands at 22.94 ETH ($57,000), making it the second-largest Ethereum-native NFT collection, according to NFT Price Floor data.
The seven-day sales volume of the Pudgy Penguins collection also rose by 143% to $6.8 million, making it the fourth-largest NFT collection in terms of weekly sales volume across all blockchains, according to CryptoSlam.
Interest in the Pudgy Penguins collection began to surge in December following the announcement of Pudgy World Alpha, a blockchain-based, open-world gaming experience set to be released in Q1 2024.
Since May 2022, the NFT market has experienced a downward trend. The floor prices of top blue-chip NFT collections, CryptoPunks and BAYC, have decreased by 48% and 82% from their all-time highs, respectively.
Related: Ethereum gas fees reach an 8-month high due to the ERC-404 craze.