Generative NFTs for art are flourishing despite the cryptocurrency decline
Important takeaways
- Floor prices for many precious generative NFT art collections have risen in recent weeks.
- William Mapan’s Anticyclone has led to a market boom that has helped several other Art Blocks collections to emerge.
- As the dollar value of assets such as ETH and XTZ has fallen, top-level generative NFTs have maintained their value.
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Market prices for many sought-after generative art NFTs have jumped in recent weeks.
Generative Art NFTs Rally
Despite falling crypto prices and weak sentiment throughout the area, part of the NFT market is showing strength.
Generative art sales have boomed in recent weeks, with many of the most sought-after collections taking advantage of the growing interest. One of the catalysts for the rally has been William Mapan’s Anticyclone, which was minted at 0.75 ETH when it was unveiled on the Art Blocks platform on 29 April. The floor price for one of the 800 intricately reproduced works of art rose steadily through June, with the cheapest pieces now priced at 5.4 ETH on the secondary market. In dollars, the floor price has risen from around $ 2100 to $ 5800.
Anticyclone lives on the Ethereum blockchain, but like many other generative artists, Mapan started in the NFT area of Tezos. Following the rise in popularity of Anticyclone, Mapan’s Dragons collection saw a parabolic rise in fxhash, Tezos’ equivalent of Art Blocks. The cheapest Dragons are currently priced at around 1700 XTZ after trading below 100 XTZ at the beginning of the year.
When a specific style of NFT transcends the market, other similar assets tend to take advantage of the buzz. As Mapan’s creations have increased in recent weeks, other generative art NFTs have also risen in value. Generative art is usually created on computers using code instead of more traditional art media such as paint and canvas. The code produces unique visual output that can be tokenized on the blockchain as NFTs. On platforms like Art Blocks, when collectors create a generative art NFT, they do not see the result until they have paid for the piece.
Although generative art is still a lesser known niche in the NFT field, it has grown at an astonishing rate over the past year. While avatar-based NFT projects such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club have dominated headlines, famous collections such as Tyler Hobbs’ Fidenza have helped put generative art on the map and attracted the attention of a small community of collectors.
Art block collections are rising
Snowfros’ Chromie Squiggle, one of the earliest collections launched at Art Blocks, has risen over the past two weeks, rising from a floor price of 6 ETH to around 11 ETH at OpenSea. Matt DesLauriers’ Meridian and Kjetil Golid’s Archetype, two other generative collections launched at Art Blocks, have followed similar paths, with the respective entry prices now at 11 ETH and 27 ETH. During the height of the NFT mania in 2021, the rarest NFTs from early collections such as Chromie Squiggle traded for millions of dollars, before the wider market fell from exhaustion and Ethereum’s downturn.
The most valuable generative NFTs also remain strong despite Ethereum’s sad price action in recent months: Autoglyphs, an early generative art project launched by CryptoPunks creator Larva Labs, has jumped to a floor price of 248 ETH at OpenSea, while Fidenza NFT- is holding a minimum price of 83 ETH.
It is worth noting that many generative art collections have remained relatively stagnant in terms of price despite the boom over some of the most in-demand collections. Also, as Ethereum and Tezos have been on a steady decline in the market for several months, the dollar value of many NFTs has taken a hit. Nevertheless, the latest generative art rally indicates that the market believes the niche’s top collections have value regardless of how their underlying base currencies perform.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH, some NFTs and several other cryptocurrencies.
