A tidal wave of wash selling makes up most of the NFT volume
What is the true value of a non-fungible token (NFT) collection, and how many of the sales of your favorite blockchains come from real collectors? If you are a trader, you already know that it is a conundrum few have been able to solve. Mix in some laundry and you now have a cipher worthy of legend.
MEGA GMs!
Do you know what the single most washing shopped #NFT is?
Introducing Terraforms (@mathcastles) #4206, swapped 20x below @LooksRare token farming last year, with over $10 million each sale. In total, it has been sold for 86,905.12 ETH or $242.97 million. The dough’s gona dough. pic.twitter.com/oF9tQW6kxl
— hudah.eth|tez (@Hudah_Idiot) 5 May 2023
This week, CryptoSlam unveiled new spot laundry trading metrics that provide traders and professionals with tools to uncover organic NFT sales from the laundry industry. And the real game changer? These new metrics aren’t just for Ethereum.
CryptoSlam’s Marketing Manager Yohann Calpu says, “As we can see from the new data published on CryptoSlam.io, the washing numbers are a large part of the sales volume across many of the top blockchains, including Ethereum. The beauty of blockchain technology is its inherent transparency, which allows us to uncover the truth behind the numbers, this only increases overall trust.”
Ethereum’s wash trade isn’t exactly breaking news, although the scale of it is often worth reporting on. The news, however, is that the public has come face to face with laundering on other blockchains. While not as extensive as wash trading on Ethereum, most other major chains now have a small percentage of volume made up of wash trades, and because of that these new tools are welcome.
Now broken down into 24-hour, seven-day, 30-day, and all time periods, traders can call in each blockchain on cryptoslam.io to get a breakdown of sales vs wash sales along with a total value in US dollars, number of transactions, and total washing percentage.
Using these tools, we can look at Ethereum’s wash trade history to compare LooksRare wash trade in 2022 with today’s Blur wash trade. It’s easy to see, the value of laundry trades in 2022 has yet to be matched, even with the all-time high of laundry trade transactions this year.
The story doesn’t end there, and I recently wrote about the extent of laundry trade on Discard News. In short, wash trades make up a significant percentage of monthly transactions and are still largely driven by traders’ farming points on the Blur market.
While the NFT market is facing a significant decline made more complicated by wash trades, it is important to measure both organic growth and wash trades.
Systems can be gamed, but the numbers don’t lie; NFTs have grown into a multi-billion dollar market. Analyzing all sales sheds light on the growth of Web3 as new technologies and products are born using decentralized platforms, game theory, DAOs and, yes, even laundry trades.
The discard 500 NFT index excludes wash sales to provide an accurate measure of NFT market value. While the total USD volume of global sales has been up over the past seven days, the Forkast 500, with wash sales removed, shows that the NFT market is actually losing value and is down over 2%.
