According to Apollo Crypto’s head of investment, sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) fell 44% in the second quarter amid a recent surge in meme coins featuring celebrities, politicians, and animals, and a slump in the cryptocurrency market.
According to data from CryptoSlam, NFT sales fell from $4.14 billion in Q1 to $2.32 billion in Q2, part of a broader market slowdown.
“Q2 was a difficult market, with Bitcoin down 15% and many altcoins performing even worse,” Henrik Andersen, chief investment officer at Apollo Crypto, told Cointelegraph.
“(However), meme coins are likely to take some mindshare away from NFT(s),” Andersson added.
Mindshare is a marketing term that refers to the degree of consumer awareness or popularity surrounding a particular product or idea.
Although NFT sales have slowed, Memecoin is still seeing massive volume, with $3.4 billion traded in the last 24 hours alone, according to CoinGecko data.
This phenomenon was largely driven by the rise of PolitiFi memecoins related to the US presidential election, while several new celebrity tokens emerged on Ethereum and Solana.
MAGA (TRUMP) and Pepe (PEPE) are some of the meme coins that saw price gains in Q2.
Sequential inscription to increase market share
Anderson notes that the development of Bitcoin-based Ordinals in the coming months could shift interest away from traditional NFTs.
“In the long term, we believe Bitcoin staking will continue to gain market share in the NFT space, especially given the large volume of Bitcoin L2s coming to market.”
Related: Celebrity Memecoin Highlights Impactful Issues in Cryptocurrency
However, both sequential and rune network activity has also declined in recent weeks.
Rune trading is down 88% from its June high, with Ordinal Inscription and Rune contributing an average of less than 2 Bitcoin (BTC) per day in mining fees last week.
NFTs have recovered before too.
NFTs saw a slight recovery in Q4 2023, generating over $3 billion in sales, which raises hopes that NFTs could make a comeback in the second half of 2024.
December 2023 brought in $1.77 billion in sales, the largest since the NFT summer began to wind down in June 2022.
According to CoinGecko data, popular NFT collectibles like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Clubs boast high market caps of $994.9 million and $345.9 million, respectively.
By comparison, the two largest Ordinals projects, NodeMonkes and Bitcoin Puppets, have market caps of $121.1 million and $94.2 million, respectively.
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