The NFT Market May Not Be Doomed After All

Coinbase opened its NFT marketplace to the general public on Wednesday, after amassing a waitlist totaling nearly 2.8 million people. The launch coincided with the announcement by crypto exchange Kraken that it was opening a waitlist for its own NFT marketplace. All of these are meant to compete with dominant marketplaces like OpenSea, but they hinge on a central question: are NFT’s still in demand?

Not according to The Wall Street Journal, which declared Tuesday “the NFT market is collapsing,” citing transaction data from a website called NonFungible. However, Tom Schmidt, a partner at crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital, suggested in a tweet  that this data was incorrect, and that data on Dune Analytics, a blockchain analytics platform, proved otherwise. 

“Dune is the easiest way to query blockchain data (scraped directly from an Ethereum node), and when we do so, we can see the data being reported from Ethereum itself is materially different from what Nonfungible is reporting,” Schmidt told me on Wednesday over Twitter via direct message.