Yuga Labs collections lead to 60% ETH NFT market decline in 2022

A new report from DappRadar reveals that Ethereum’s NFT market cap fell from $9.3 billion to $3.7 billion last year, with Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds collection falling the most.

The report found that the market value of Otherdeeds, an NFT collection that forms a crucial part of Yuga Labs’ metaverse ambitions, fell 86% in 2022 to $356 million.

Yuga Lab’s large collections lead to significant losses

According to the report, Yuga Labs’ collections account for 67% of the total market cap of Ethereum NFTs, with Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks contributing nearly half of the company’s total NFT market cap.

The 200,000-piece Otherdeeds collection grossed over $700 million at launch, pushing its market cap to $2.5 billion. At the end of 2022, the market value fell 86%.

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s capitalization fell by nearly 65% ​​to $934 million at the end of 2022, while the valuation of the less popular Bored Ape Kennel Club fell by nearly 50% to $101 million.

Also down was Yuga Labs’ Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection, whose market cap fell 64.8% to $373 million at year-end.

CryptoPunk’s floor price defies bear market as collection gets minted

Despite this decline, DappRadar’s machine learning algorithm, currently in Beta, found several collections whose profitability increased in the early stages of the 2022 crypto winter.

The Azuki collection, created by Chiru Labs, appreciated by 1,660% to $1.1 billion between the start of 2022 and April of that year, mainly driven by another collection called Beanz, while the market value of Pudgy Penguins rose by 478% to a -hour high of $112 million.

CryptoPunks, a collection of 8-bit profile picture NFTs acquired by Yuga Labs in 2021, saw a 60.24% decline but managed to maintain a floor price of nearly $100,000 or around 63 ETH at press time.

A new Bitcoin-based NFT protocol called Ordinals re-coined CryptoPunks as Bitcoin Punks with byte-level precision.

To “coin” an NFT using Ordinals, NFT data is enumerated in the witness part of a Bitcoin transaction with a content type and a body. The NFT begins its journey as an inscription made on the first satoshi of the transaction’s first output, which becomes traceable using the Ordinals numbering protocol. A Satoshi is one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin.

Ordinal’s Future Unclear despite a promising start

While there is no official marketplace for Ordinals, early data from Dune Analytics suggests that images have been the most popular content type.

While it’s unclear if Ordinals will take off, the Bitcoin Punks Discord moderator recently launched a marketplace Discord channel. Interested traders are already engaging in over-the-counter transactions using the Bitcoin wallet Sparrow.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others pioneered a Bitcoin project called Colored Coins in 2013 to bring additional tokens with limited capabilities to the Bitcoin architecture. Although the idea did not flourish, it was one of the first NFT expressions before Ethereum.

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