Overview of the market for NFTs, where the majority of assets sold on OpenSea in the past 90 days have not seen another deal
Bloomberg : Tweets: @kingkaidev and @justinaknope Tweets: KingKai / @kingkaidev : assuming this is accurate, i expect it's one of the reasons we won't see a large NFT “bubble pop” same reason consumerism bubble doesn't pop. most ppl don't rly expect to turn a profit. it feels good in the moment and then you just hold 😂 https://twitter.com/... Justina Lee / @justinaknope : One day I got asked what's actually happening across the full spectrum of the NFT market Couldn't find much data out there So I teamed up with @madcampb to crunch all the data on what it looks like beyond CryptoPunks/Loot/Pudgy: https://www.bloomberg.com/... @crypto @markets https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Bloomberg's Justinina Lee and Madeline Campbell crunched the full NFT market — not just headline collections like CryptoPunks — and found that the majority of assets sold on OpenSea in the past 90 days never traded again. That reframes the boom: if most buyers aren't flipping, the market behaves less like a speculative bubble waiting to pop and more like consumption, as one commentator quoted in the piece argues.
The finding also foreshadows what came after: OpenSea's daily volumes fell 80% from their February 2022 peak, and a later sweep of 19.3M NFTs across ~8,400 collections found one in three with little or no trading activity — the illiquidity was visible in this dataset before it showed up in prices.
First-order effects
- OpenSea's reported trading volume overstates real market activity: when most sold assets never resell, each token contributes roughly one transaction, so growth depends on continuous new minting rather than turnover of an existing stock.
Second-order effects
- With resale activity concentrated in a small set of collections, liquidity and pricing power pool around the top names — CryptoPunks alone accounted for $3B of 2021 sales — while the long tail of collections trades rarely or below mint cost.
Third-order effects
- A market where most assets are held rather than traded structurally shifts platform revenue toward primary issuance and fees, which is why royalty economics became the battleground: payouts to creators collapsed 98% by mid-2023 as OpenSea and Blur cut rates once volume dried up.
The trend: The NFT market is splitting into a thin layer of liquid, heavily-traded collections atop a vast illiquid long tail bought to hold rather than flip — a consumption asset more than a trading one.