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Galaxy tips Bitcoin NFT market to hit $4.5B by 2025

March 4, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Bitcoin

Galaxy’s estimation was based on the rapid uptick of interest in Bitcoin NFTs, currency market infrastructure, and the potential to take some market-share away from Ethereum.

In a “base case” scenario, Galaxy Digital's research unit has tipped the burgeoning Bitcoin nonfungible token (NFT) market to hit a $4.5 billion market cap by March 2025.

Bitcoin NFTs, or Ordinals, have attracted a significant amount of attention since the Ordinals protocol launched in late January, enabling users to inscribe data such as images, PDFs video and audio onto individual satoshis, or sats that each represent 0.00000001 Bitcoin (BTC).

NFT giants such as Yuga Labs have even jumped in on the hype. On Feb. 28, the $4 billion firm behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club announced a Bitcoin-based NFT project dubbed “TwelveFold,” marking a notable form of recognition of the Ordinals movement.

In a new report published on March. 3, Galaxy researchers analyzed the potential growth of Bitcoin NFTs and made estimations “conservatively based on the current size of Ethereum’s NFT market” and its growth rate over the past few years.

“While there are notable differences between inscriptions and NFTs, it’s fair to say that a native on-chain ecosystem for NFTs has emerged on Bitcoin in a way that was never before possible, and its usage has been exploding.”

The report provided three different market cap predictions based on the firm’s analysis, covering a bear case, base case and bull case scenarios.

Looking at Galaxy’s baseline analysis, the report outlined that if Bitcoin NFTs can “expand to mainstream NFT culture like PFPs [Profile Pictures], memes and utility projects,” the market capitalization should increase to $4.5 billion.

The researchers also noted that the projection of $4.5 billion is also based on the “rapid development in inscription awareness coupled with the marketplace/wallet infrastructure already [being] out today.”

Fantastic research piece by @intangiblecoins at @galaxyhq on the rise of Bitcoin Ordinals:

- $4.5B base case market
- Help with Bitcoin's fee market
- Increase the design space for smart contracts

Read more here
— Dan Held (@danheld) March 3, 2023

In a bear case, in which Bitcoin NFTs don’t creep into the mainstream NFT market and pry market share away from Ethereum, Galaxy estimated that Bitcoin NFTs can still reach a market cap of $1.5 billion based on the current level of interest and supporting infrastructure.

On the bullish side of things, Galaxy researchers estimate that the Bitcoin NFT market could reach around $10 billion if it manages to provide strong competition to Ethereum NFTs, while also providing unique use cases.

*Estimated Bitcoin NFT market cap: Galaxy Digital*

At the time of the report, more than 250,000 Ordinals have hit the market, and highlighting the significance and utility of Bitcoin NFTs, the researchers noted that:

“The addition of sizeable data storage with strong availability assurances opens up a variety of use cases, many of which are only beginning to be explored, including things like new types of decentralized software or bitcoin scaling techniques. Even the NFT use-case alone, though, has the potential to dramatically widen the scope of Bitcoin’s cultural impact.”

The Bitcoin Dark Ages are over

Fun is back on the menu, boys pic.twitter.com/ybk5NKObmB
— Eric Wall ‍♂️ Taproot Wizard #2 (@ercwl) March 3, 2023

NFT Sales This Week Jumped 27% Higher, Cryptopunks Rise Above Bored Apes

December 14, 2022 Bitcoin.com

This Week’s NFT Sales Slid 5% Lower Than Last Week, Ethereum NFT Sales Accounted for 76.8% of the Volume

December 5, 2022 Bitcoin.com

Almost everything could be tokenized in 5-10 years — Matrixport co-founder

September 27, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Blockchain

Cost efficiencies, improved liquidity, 24/7 market access, and the removal of intermediaries were the main advantages' cited which blockchain infrastructure has over current legacy systems.

In five to ten years, almost every “real world” asset class could be tokenized in the form of a nonfungible token (NFT) according to Cynthia Wu, co-founder of digital asset service platform Matrixport.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Wu said the best case for NFTs would see the widespread representation of real-world assets to be stored and traded on-chain:

“Eventually all the major financial asset classes are going to be represented on this new financial infrastructure [and] NFTs could be our instrument to represent off-chain assets like real estate deeds, equities or bonds.”

The move on-chain would make these real world assets “more liquid and more tradable” which would improve price discovery and transaction activity, Wu added.

But Wu said that while it’s great that we’ve created over two trillion worth of digital native assets on-chain from Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and other tokens, the only niche to have generated NFT transaction activity has come from digital collectibles — which hasn’t really helped institutional adoption:

“We haven't really been seeing off-chain assets being represented on-chain [...] we're now really only at the first 3-5% of it.”

But nonetheless, Wu is confident that the tide will turn.

Earlier this month, a report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimated the total size of tokenized illiquid assets to reach $16.1 trillion by 2030.

BCG predicted much of this tokenization to come from pre-initial public offering (IPO) stocks, real estate, private debt, and revenue generated from small to medium-sized businesses.

However, while the tokenization of real-world assets has piqued the interest of financial institutions, Wu said some have been a bit reluctant to move on from the legacy systems that have served them well over the years.

Wu pointed out the traditional financial system hasn’t accounted for the trading of nonfungible assets because they can’t easily be exchanged the same way a fungible or divisible asset can, but tokenization on the blockchain provides a solution for that.

She also argued that blockchain infrastructure is the superior option to legacy systems, citing cost efficiencies, improved liquidity, 24/7 market access, and the removal of intermediaries as the main factors that would lead to a more streamlined financial system.

Matrixport was established in Feb. 2019, and currently manages between $3-4 billion in digital assets from a broad mix of retail and institutional clients.

WSJ says ‘the NFT market is collapsing’ but the data says otherwise

May 4, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

An article by the WSJ suggesting the non-fungible token (NFT) market is “collapsing” doesn’t show the full picture as contrasting analysis reveal a consolidation is instead taking place.

An article in the Wall Street Journal has claimed sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are “flatlining” — in the same week that the top five collections alone accounted for more than $1 billion in primary and secondary sales.

The article cited data from NFT market analysis platform Nonfungible suggesting the number of NFT sales has fallen by 92% since an all-time high in September 2021. Wallets active in the Ethereum (ETH) NFT market were also said to have declined by 88% since a high in November 2021.

“The NFT market is collapsing,” the article concluded.

*Red line shows number of sales with volume on left y-axis, white shows active market wallets, volume on right y-axis. Source:* *Nonfungible*

However, onchain data from Dune Analytics’ dashboard suggest that the NFT market is still robust, with information showing that NFT users and transactions are much higher than what’s reported by Nonfungible.

*Dune Analytics NFT transactions per day*

Analytics also show that volume per day in USD on Ethereum NFTs over the week is some of the highest seen since February with popular marketplace OpenSea seeing nearly $550 million in volume on May 1 alone.

Analysis from Tom Schmidt, partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly Capital shows a similar story when focused on OpenSea transactions and USD volume.

come on, man pic.twitter.com/CTJFldAHNk
— Tom Schmidt (@tomhschmidt) May 3, 2022

Sub-sectors within the NFT market are emerging and while some areas of the oversaturated market are in a downturn, others are seeing major gains.

Nansen’s analytics platform which indexes NFT collections by type show that “Blue Chip” NFTs — established and highly prized brands such as the Bored and Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Azuki tokens — are far outperforming art or gaming tokens.

The Nansen Blue Chip-10 Index tracking the top 10 NFT projects is up 81% year to date (YTD), while comparatively the indexes tracking the top art and gaming NFT collections are respectively down 39% and 49% YTD.

This phenomenon of NFT market capital consolidating into the top collections was pointed out in an analysis by NFTstatistics.eth who shared a chart in late April showing the top 5 collections are driving the Ethereum NFT market.

This trend continues: BAYC, Azuki, CloneX, Doodles & now Moonbirds separating themselves from everyone else.

I've talked about large-caps outperforming, but it's really the top-5 projects driving all the gains. pic.twitter.com/UsUlwHMJ9M
— NFTstatistics.eth (@punk9059) April 26, 2022

“There’s clearly a trend right now that five or six of the most successful projects are sharply outperforming while the rest are flat to down,” pseudonymous NFT market analyzer NFTstatistics.eth told Cointelegraph.

The data from Nonfungible shows a spike on May 1 with the number of sales and active wallets that day hitting numbers not seen in their data from November 8 2021 directly correlating with the record-breaking (and Ethereum breaking) Otherside metaverse land sale by Yuga Labs again contradicting the claim that NFT sales are “flatlining.”

It’s not clear why the Nonfungible data the WSJ relied on is misaligned with Dune’s data, however it could be due to the inclusion of sales volume from P2E gameAxie Infinity by Nonfungible.

Volume for the popular play-to-earn hit an all-time high of over $40 million on November 4 2021 before a gradual decline to its current levels of around $500,000 according to CryptoSlam data.

But the collapse in popularity of a P2E game as NFTstatistics.eth says “is an extremely different message from ‘NFTs are collapsing.’”

@DJohnson_CPA suggests that AxieInfinity was so big it dominated numbers in November and has since collapsed. Seems possible.

From where I sit, this is an extremely different message from "NFTs are collapsing"https://t.co/lq66GbhbAj
— NFTstatistics.eth (@punk9059) May 3, 2022

While the current debate focuses on Ethereum NFTs, Solana is fast becoming a popular blockchain for this type of asset and is the second-largest blockchain behind Ethereum for NFT sales volume.

Last week, the Solana NFT project Okay Bears topped OpenSea’s 24-hour sales tracker for the first time, and holds fourth place behind the Mutant Ape Yacht Club in 7 day sales volume on CryptoSlam with over $47 million worth transacted.

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Ethereum NFTs

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