Yuga Labs Collections Drive 60% ETH NFT Market Decline in 2022

A new report by DappRadar reveals that Ethereum’s NFT market cap fell from $9.3 billion to $3.7 billion last year, with Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds collection falling the most.

The report found that the market cap of Otherdeeds, an NFT collection forming a crucial part of Yuga Labs’ metaverse ambitions, fell 86% in 2022 to $356 million.

Yuga Labs Major Collections Post Significant Losses

According to the report, Yuga Labs’ collections make up 67% of the total market cap of Ethereum NFTs, with Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks contributing almost half of the company’s overall NFT market cap.

The 200,000-piece Otherdeeds collection raked in over $700 million upon launch, pushing its market cap to $2.5 billion. By the end of 2022, the market cap fell 86%.

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s capitalization fell by almost 65% to $934 million by the end of 2022, while the valuation of the less popular Bored Ape Kennel Club declined by nearly 50% to $101 million.

Also down was Yuga Labs’ Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection, whose market cap decreased 64.8% to $373 million by year-end.

CryptoPunks Floor Price Defies Bear Market as Collection is Re-Minted

Despite this decline, DappRadar’s machine-learning algorithm, currently in Beta, found several collections whose profitability rose during the early stages of the 2022 crypto winter. 

The Azuki collection, created by Chiru Labs, appreciated by 1,660% to $1.1 billion between the start of 2022 and April of that year, driven largely by another collection called Beanz, while the market cap of Pudgy Penguins rose 478% to an all-time high of $112 million. 

CryptoPunks, a collection of 8-bit profile picture NFTs acquired by Yuga Labs in 2021, saw a decline of 60.24% but managed to sustain a floor price of almost $100,000 or around 63 ETH at press time.

A new Bitcoin-based NFT protocol called Ordinals recently re-minted CryptoPunks as Bitcoin Punks with byte-level precision. 

To “mint” an NFT using Ordinals, NFT data is enumerated in the Witness portion of a Bitcoin transaction with a content type and body. The NFT starts its journey as an inscription made on the first satoshi of the transaction’s first output, which becomes trackable using the Ordinals numbering protocol. A Satoshi is a one hundred millionth of a Bitcoin. 

Ordinals Future Unclear Despite Promising Start

While there is no official marketplace for Ordinals, early data from Dune Analytics suggests that images have been the most popular content type.

While it is unclear whether Ordinals will take off, the Bitcoin Punks Discord moderator recently launched a marketplace Discord channel. Interested traders are already engaging in Over-The-Counter transactions using the Bitcoin wallet Sparrow.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and others pioneered a Bitcoin project called Colored Coins in 2013 to bring additional tokens with restricted abilities to the Bitcoin architecture. While the idea didn’t flourish, it was one of the first NFT expressions before Ethereum.

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