Dune Analytics: NFT trading volumes fell 97% from a record $17.2B in January 2022 to $466.9M in September 2022
Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
Dune Analytics' September 2022 reading confirmed what the year had been building toward: the NFT market that peaked at $17.2B in January was running at roughly a thirty-sixth of that by fall. By December, Wired was profiling which use cases might survive the collapse, with gaming emerging as the leading utility case as monthly volume sat near $400M.
The floor kept giving way — DappRadar later measured an 81% decline from January 2022 through July 2023, with traders rotating back into cryptocurrencies outright. Dune's own dashboards then tracked where the speculative energy went next: prediction markets, where Polymarket and Kalshi went on to post $2B+ notional weeks that exceeded their 2024 election peak.
First-order effects
- Marketplaces built on NFT take rates saw revenue collapse in step with volume — Dune's related data showed Coinbase's NFT marketplace logging fewer than 110 transactions and under $60,000 in sales in a five-hour window.
- Holders of blue-chip collections faced a liquidity problem: at $466.9M in monthly volume against a market that once cleared $17.2B, exit capacity for large positions had largely evaporated.
Second-order effects
- Funding followed the volume down — PitchBook put 2023 crypto VC investment at $9.5B, down 68% YoY, while CryptoSlam counted NFT sales falling another 63% to $8.7B, forcing NFT startups to chase utility narratives like gaming to justify valuations.
- Trading infrastructure and liquidity migrated to adjacent crypto venues, with DappRadar attributing part of the NFT decline to capital returning to pure cryptocurrency trading.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crypto speculation behaves less like a single asset class and more like a rotating attention market — NFTs in 2021-22, then memecoin launches (Dune tracked 1.7M new tokens in H1 2024 alone) and prediction markets — with each cycle leaving the previous venue structurally smaller.
- Sustained collapse pressures regulators and platforms to treat NFTs as collectibles-with-utility rather than financial products, since the trading-volume case for treating them as an investment class weakened alongside the market itself.
The trend: Speculative volume on crypto rails is cyclical rather than secular — it rotates from one venue (NFTs) to the next (memecoins, prediction markets) instead of leaving the ecosystem.