Nansen: users spent ~$2.7B worth of ether to mint NFTs in H1 2022; 50.7% of the ETH raised stayed with the NFT projects and 45.7% went to non-entity wallets
Over 1 million unique wallet addresses were involved in the minting process, signaling that nonfungible token market activity remained strong. Source: Nansen .
Context & Ripple Effects
Ethereum-based NFT activity had been compounding for two years before this print: total transaction value rose from $62M in 2019 to $250M+ in 2020 (per the earlier Decrypt tally), and Chainalysis then sized 2021 NFT spending at nearly $41B (with small sub-$10K transactions dominating). Nansen's H1 2022 minting figure — ~$2.7B in ether from over 1 million unique wallets — lands at the top of that curve, measuring the primary-issuance layer specifically.
The distribution split is what makes it analytically useful: only 50.7% of the ETH raised stayed with the NFT projects themselves, while 45.7% went to wallets Nansen could not attribute to any entity. That matters because Nansen later showed royalties collapsing to a two-year low as royalty-optional platforms spread — meaning mint proceeds were the one revenue stream projects could count on, and they were already keeping barely half of it.
First-order effects
- Projects raising via mints retain just over half their gross ether (50.7%), with 45.7% flowing to non-entity wallets — so headline raise sizes materially overstate what founding teams actually banked.
- Over 1 million unique addresses minted in six months, confirming the retail breadth behind the 2021–22 boom that Chainalysis had measured at $41B for full-year 2021.
Second-order effects
- With Chainalysis showing 32.4K wallets holding 80% of NFT value, a near-half mint share landing in unlabeled wallets points toward insider and concentrated-holder capture, pressuring projects to demonstrate genuine distribution to buyers.
- As secondary markets shifted to royalty-optional models, primary-mint proceeds became the dominant reliable revenue line — the dynamic that preceded the royalty collapse Nansen documented in mid-2023.
Third-order effects
- If mint treasuries are one-time raises and royalties are increasingly optional, NFT project economics tilt toward serial re-issuance and utility-backed launches, favoring repeat issuers over long-tail collections dependent on secondary fees.
- On-chain attribution firms like Nansen and Chainalysis become de facto auditors of where crypto-raised funds actually settle — a role regulators and limited partners are likely to lean on as token fundraising scales.
The trend: NFT project revenue is migrating from guaranteed primary-mint raises to contested, optional royalties, with on-chain analytics firms mapping who actually captures the value.