A look at Art Blocks, an NFT marketplace for generative art whose sales reportedly dropped to $6.5M in April 2023 from $587M in August 2021
- Volumes have fallen steeply for Art Blocks, the generative art platform that boomed in the last crypto bull run. Mastodon: @carnage4life@mas.to . Tweets: @nfinitylabs Mastodon: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life@mas.to : From selling half a billion dollars a month in NFTs in 2021 to $6.5M in 2023. The real shock is that there's still enough interest to sell millions in JPEGs a month. — I remember trying to get into NFTs until I realized it was just gambling on the price of JPEGs. … Tweets: @nfinitylabs : [1] - As NFT sales dwindle, @artblocks_io resists pinning hopes on a renewed crypto bull run.📣 Crypto “is just waiting for that next bull run, and there may not be another,” Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon said. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Art Blocks was the curated face of the 2021 NFT boom, when total sales hit $2B in a single quarter and platforms like OpenSea were clearing nine-figure weekly volumes. The decline has been rolling since early 2022, when OpenSea's daily volumes fell 80% in a month and weekly unit sales dropped over 70% by mid-year.
The April 2023 figure puts Art Blocks at roughly 1% of its August 2021 peak, and it arrives amid a royalty war: OpenSea and Blur have been cutting royalty rates, while Art Blocks is one of the platforms still enforcing a 5% royalty fee for creators. Nansen's data shows the stakes — creator payouts collapsed 98% from their January 2022 peak by July 2023.
First-order effects
- Art Blocks' revenue and its artists' income are directly tied to the collapsed volume: a 5% royalty on $6.5M in monthly sales is a fraction of what the same fee generated at the 2021 peak, squeezing Erick Calderon's platform and the generative artists who mint there.
- The platform is explicitly refusing to pin its recovery on a renewed crypto bull run, which means it is managing for a sustained low-volume market rather than a cyclical bounce.
Second-order effects
- Art Blocks' insistence on honoring the 5% royalty positions it against the zero-royalty race between OpenSea and Blur — a differentiator that can attract royalty-dependent artists, but only if curated demand holds up better than speculative trading volume has.
- As creator payouts across the market shrink toward Nansen's near-zero baseline, artists have less income cushion, pressuring platforms to compete on guaranteed royalties rather than raw liquidity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the NFT market splits structurally: high-volume trading venues that treat royalties as optional, and small curated platforms like Art Blocks that survive on collector demand for generative work — with the royalty-enforcing model tested by whether millions in monthly sales can sustain it.
- The broader correction suggests the 2021 boom was driven by speculation rather than durable collecting demand, raising the question of whether royalty-funded creator economics were ever viable at anything but peak volumes.
The trend: The NFT market is consolidating into a split between zero-royalty speculative trading venues and small royalty-enforcing curated platforms, with Art Blocks' collapse testing whether the latter model survives the end of the bull run.