Written by: Wenser, Odaily
As the year draws to a close, the crypto industry is also facing its own "year-end review" moment. Compared to the hot sectors like AI, Meme, and Desci, NFT has undoubtedly been a bit gloomy. If it weren't for the recent launch of the fat penguin PENGU token at the end of the year, many might have wondered if the NFT bull market ever really existed.
Looking back on 2024 as a whole, for the NFT track, it can be described as "a tortuous fate". Nevertheless, it remains undoubtedly a presence in the crypto market, even becoming a trendy driver and a constant presence. Combined with this article, Odaily will review a series of representative events in the NFT track in 2024, and let us reminisce about the "love-hate" of this year for NFT.
First Half of 2024: Dreamlike Start and the "Meme King"
Going back to the beginning of 2024, it can be said to be a "dreamlike start" for many NFT players.
After the hype of a series of BTC ecosystem NFTs, the market sentiment once warmed up, and the prices of node monkeys and puppet monkeys BTC NFTs once reached as high as 0.5 BTC. Considering the current BTC price breaking a new high of $108,000, it is still unbelievable. To be blunt, for many BTC inscription players, NFT players, and even later rune players, rushing back and forth, constantly FOMO, the most likely outcome is "the harder you work, the more you lose money", rather than just holding and not moving.
Nevertheless, under the stimulus of good news such as the imminent approval of the BTC spot ETF, the "year of the NFT track in 2024" finally kicked off. The first to take the stage was the Ethereum ecosystem NFT project - Tinfun.
January: The "IP Dream" of the Top KOL in the Chinese NFT Circle
As the top KOL in the Chinese NFT circle, the launch of Tinfun undoubtedly gathered a lot of the heart and blood of Lasecat. In addition, its behind-the-scenes Alpha community, the Eastern ink painting style of Tinfun NFT, and the martial arts world narrative are also the many reasons why Tinfun has attracted much attention.
After Azuki's great success, countless players in the Chinese NFT circle hope to have a truly representative "Eastern aesthetic" NFT project break through the siege, gather a group of their own fans in the crypto world, and prove to the world: "Chinese culture is the coolest!" Based on the NFT sample images revealed by the project, Tinfun undoubtedly has this possibility, so many people have high hopes for it. In addition, Tinfun's mini-games were once welcomed by the community at that time, and the entertainment atmosphere was relatively strong as the year-end approached the Spring Festival. Furthermore, Tinfun also innovated the NFT Mint process - creating the "pay-to-mint" gameplay, eliminating the trouble of a large amount of Gas waste caused by NFT players rushing to mint.
Due to the stimulation of various favorable factors, on the public sale day of January 7, the Tinfun project received deposits of over 10,000 ETH, about $22.8 million, in less than 24 hours; and on January 8, the public sale participation amount reached the expected target of 25,000 ETH, and the public sale ended ahead of schedule. Due to the large participation amount, at that time, there were still many overseas bloggers who suspected that Lasecat would "run away directly", after all, in the crypto circle, this dark forest without any trust, human nature is often difficult to withstand the test.
But Lasecat and the behind-the-team are obviously not this kind of person. Lasecat even said directly: "I may fail, but I will never run away."
The subsequent airdrops and secondary trading of Tinfun also once triggered market FOMO, with the floor price once breaking 0.8 ETH. However, after the images were revealed, the artistic details and homogeneity issues of Tinfun NFT were inevitably questioned by the market, coupled with the "IP development roadmap" planned by Tinfun later, it still could not escape the fate of the "downward spiral of the NFT project floor price".
According to data from the NFTGo website, the current floor price of Tinfun NFT is around 0.11 ETH, but the average transaction price is around 0.5 ETH, and the number of holding addresses has gradually decreased to around 1,400 now.
Tinfun floor price related information, source: NFTGo
It is worth mentioning that, affected by the Blur Phase 3 activity and the Blast airdrop expectation, Tinfun decided through community voting in early March to migrate the project to the Blast chain. Subsequently, some Tinfun holders also obtained certain Blast ecosystem gold points rewards due to various Blast projects or activities, but in terms of NFT rewards, it can only be said to be better than nothing.
Looking at it now, in a sense, the Tinfun project shows one thing: NFT projects still cannot get rid of the "liquidity vortex" and avoid the spiral decline of crypto project token/NFT prices, especially in the IP development path, it is undoubtedly more difficult.
February: Nobody - The NFT Community with the "Stephen Chow Halo"
If Tinfun opened a good start for NFT in 2024, then the NFT project Nobody under Stephen Chow is more like a "rising with the tide" another "celebrity NFT project".
The project took more than half a year, and by borrowing the famous movie "A Chinese Odyssey" from Stephen Chow's "Moonlight Box", the project was originally named Moonbox, and later changed to Nobody to enhance the community attributes. There were even community members who wrote songs and paintings under the name of Nobody and initiated a series of secondary creations. After Tinfun successfully launched with the "pay-to-mint" model, Nobody also learned from it and conducted NFT sales in the same way, and successfully completed the sales.
Furthermore, after the sales ended, the floor price of Nobody quickly grew about 5 times, and on February 5, the floor price once broke 0.9 ETH, with a trading volume of 2,500 ETH, triggering countless FOMO entries and continuous buying. It must be said that at that time, many NFT players, due to the previous "all celebrity NFT projects are traps, scams, and one-time cash-outs" stereotype, did not participate in this project in depth, and were equally unprepared for this violent price surge.
Of course, those who didn't get a share of this rise naturally also avoided the "beating" of the subsequent floor price drop.
Although later Stephen Chow himself interacted with NFT holders on the Nobody community Discord, even opened an X platform account to endorse and solicit community feedback on the project's future development, and Memeland founder and 9GAG CEO Chen Zhanpeng (9gagceo.eth) also bought Nobody #889 NFT at 19.52 WETH to express his support, Nobody still fell into silence after experiencing the "image quality questioning" like most NFT projects, and the price gradually declined. By mid-March, the NFT fell below the issue price of 0.19527 ETH.
According to data from the NFTGo website, the current floor price of Nobody is around 0.054 ETH, and the number of holding addresses is around 3,000. As for Stephen Chow's X platform account, the last update is still on June 1 this year about the promotion of a 9527 theater short film.
Nobody NFT floor price related information, source: NFTGo
Since then, another "celebrity NFT failure case" has been added, and Stephen Chow, the King of Comedy and a legendary actor, has also failed to break this curse.
March: BOME - A Meme Coin Frenzy Triggered by an NFT Artist
As time moved into March, there were not many noteworthy specific NFT projects, but just like the theme song of "Ultraman Tiga" said: "A new storm has appeared, how can we remain stagnant?"
While the market was immersed in the joy of BTC's new high, a Meme coin frenzy triggered by an NFT artist was quietly brewing in the background.
Crypto artist Darkfarms 1 was the first to launch the "2024 NFT Artist Coin Launch", and perhaps someone had done this before him, but no one had ever reached the height of the project he released, because the name of this Meme coin is - BOME (Book Of MEME). After raising 10,000 SOL, Darkfarms 1 also withstood the test of human nature, not fleeing with the funds, but pioneered the use of a large amount of funds to join the token liquidity pool, thus triggering a "3-day Binance Speedrun" Meme coin miracle.
On March 14, shortly after the BOME sale, its market value quickly broke through $50 million; 9 hours after its launch, its market value had exceeded $100 million, with the price breaking through $0.0015, an increase of more than 30 times the issue price;
On March 15, the BOME price broke through $0.0025, setting a new high; then its price soared like a rocket, and around 12 o'clock that night, the BOME price successfully broke through $0.01, with the market value growing to nearly $700 million.
Affected by the soaring BOME price, the floor price of Darkfarms' previously launched NFT series SMOWL once broke through 0.4 ETH, with a single-day increase of 71.14% and a 7-day increase of 713.66%; in addition, the number of active addresses on the Solana network reached a one-month high (1.19 million) on the day of BOME's launch, with the highest growth of 115.66% in the period from February 14 to March 14; affected by the BOME craze, from March 14 to 16, the number of new Meme tokens issued on the Solana network surged, with 8,849 new SPL tokens issued on March 14, and is expected to exceed the one-month high (9,690) this week.
Not only that, BOME also pioneered a new asset issuance model of "crowdfunding-style coin launch", which has triggered countless imitators. For example, the Meme project COCO (Little Crocodile) initiated by the NFT artist and crypto KOL Kero (@KeroNFTs) received over 42,000 SOL, worth over $7.5 million, within 2 hours of the crowdfunding, and the market went crazy for a while. In addition, Mfers founder Satoshi, Doodles co-founder and others also followed suit, and Meme coins issued by NFT artists such as MFERSCOIN are also active in the Solana, ETH, and Base ecosystems.
Of course, this coin launch path has also brought more scams and chaos to the market, including the subsequent crypto KOL VT who scammed over 20,000 BNB, the crypto old sickle Huang Licheng (Maji) who scammed over 190,000 SOL, and Dexter behind GM.ai who raised nearly 160,000 SOL, all of whom are the actual beneficiaries of this process.
But all this cannot bypass the key step - the listing of BOME on Binance.
According to the official announcement, Binance will list BOME 1-50x U-Perpetual Futures on March 16, 2024 at 20:30 (UTC+8).
As soon as the news came out, the market sentiment began to shift from frenzy to madness.
After all, for many crypto projects that have gone through several rounds of VC investment and community financing, getting their tokens listed on Binance is an extremely difficult task, but now, a Meme coin launched by an NFT artist has completed the "Binance listing journey" in just 3 days, which many projects couldn't achieve in 3 years, making it hard not to feel a sense of "developing a serious project is no match for launching a Meme coin". In addition, the Solana ecosystem's one-click coin launch platform pump.fun has also begun to emerge, thus kicking off the "Meme coin craze" that will set the tone for this year and even this cycle.
Although Binance subsequently listed a batch of "VC coins" when the market sentiment was high and liquidity was good, many "high FDV, low circulation" project tokens, in addition to unilaterally extracting liquidity from the market, are hard to not be abandoned compared to Meme coins with a lower understanding threshold, broader mass base, and lower buy-in cost.
After all, in the eyes of many, countless seemingly serious VC coins, from the perspective of usefulness, are not as good as "Meme coins that make people smile and provide emotional value".
From another comparative perspective, Meme coins are also Fungible Tokens of NFTs, and we have elaborated on this view in our article "Meme Coins: The Perfect Substitute for NFTs" published in May this year, welcome to review.
Regarding the NFT track, the 404 protocol that promoted the "image coin conversion" concept in the first half of the year also once triggered market FOMO, and the price of the Pandora protocol token PANDORA once exceeded $30,000, with an exaggerated increase, and the subsequent 314 protocol (see the article "Will the 314 Protocol Be the Next ERC 721?") also brought short-term attention hotspots to the market, but ultimately they were obscured by the masses due to the inability to maintain liquidity.
Regarding the NFT track in the first half of the year, three things are worth mentioning:
- First, leveraging the Meme coin craze in the Solana ecosystem, Base also attracted a certain amount of market liquidity in March and April due to the low network interaction cost, and its NFTs also briefly gained some market attention, and we have introduced some representative projects in the article "Counting the Top NFTs in the Base Ecosystem, Who Rises, Who Falls, Who Issues Coins?", although no project has successfully broken through, but it has brought some increments to the NFT track in 2024.
- Second, this year is the US presidential election year, and Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has also "made frequent efforts" in the NFT track, as he previously launched his first NFT series "Trump Digital Trading Cards" in December 2022, and then released two new series "Trump Digital Trading Cards Series 2" and "Mugshot Edition" in 2023, earning a total of $7.15 million from these NFTs, which also indirectly proves the strong fundraising ability of celebrity NFTs, although the result is likely to be a mess.
- Third, the founder of the well-known NFT series Milady, Charlotte Fang, also launched a fundraising campaign in June, announcing the release of an Ethereum-based Meme called CULT, which raised over $20 million in just 7 hours, which still surprises the market with its enthusiasm and frenzy for Meme coins. But no one could have imagined that it would take half a year.
And in the second half of the year, the aftershocks of the above events will continue.
Second Half of 2024: Internal and External Troubles and the Coin Launch Craze
As the Meme coin craze progresses in full swing, the NFT track is once again entering a "garbage time".
Countless blue-chip NFT projects have disappeared from public view, as if they have vanished, and only the founders of a few NFT projects like Pudgy Penguins and Weirdo Ghost Gang are still active on the X platform, keeping an eye on the market's movements and occasionally reporting on the status of their projects and their views on industry developments.
What brings people's limited attention back to NFTs is the former "world's largest NFT trading platform" OpenSea - and the "crypto public enemy" it faces - the US SEC.
At the end of August, according to market news, the NFT market OpenSea received a Wells notice from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, becoming the latest "crypto project under scrutiny" after Coinbase, Lido, Bittrex, Uniswap, and Robinhood. Leveraging this event, we also delved into the industry-wide problems facing the NFT track in the article "OpenSea Receives SEC Wells Notice, Is the NFT Track Predestined for a Disastrous Ending?", and the subsequent trajectory of many NFT projects has confirmed our judgment at the time.
As the industry continues to evolve, NFTs have gradually become "identity credentials" and "equity credentials" for many projects, and the "IP carrier", "collection value", and "marketing function" that were once highly anticipated by many Web2 companies and brands have been gradually compressed, but the NFT track has ushered in another round of market expectations, that is - the issuance of coins by NFT platforms or NFT projects.
Aside from Blast, which is closely related to the NFT trading market Blur, the multi-chain NFT trading platform Magic Eden and the soon-to-be-released new version of OpenSea are also highly anticipated. NFT projects under Animoca Brands' Mocaverse, blue-chip NFTs like Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, and Doodles are also potential token issuance projects.
In this way, the NFT market is delaying its own downtime while waiting and hoping for new hope.
In September, at the launch event of the crypto project WLFI, US presidential candidate Trump attributed his change in attitude towards Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to the success of his NFT series.
In late October, the famous crypto artist Beeple posted that "NFT speculators have left the market, leaving only core enthusiasts".
In November, according to CryptoSlam data, in October 2024, the NFT trading volume reached $356 million, an 18% increase from the previous month, breaking the seven-month consecutive decline. In addition, the total NFT trading volume also increased, with 7.2 million transactions in October, up 42% from 5 million in September.
In early December, on the verge of the market's patience being exhausted, the long-awaited "NFT project token issuance wave" has not yet arrived, but the bad news that the blue-chip NFT CloneX/RTFKT studio behind the Clones will cease operations in January 2025 has come first.
But the market has no time to mourn or even grieve for it, and what follows is the long-awaited NFT project token issuance wave -
On December 9, the MEME coin project CULT, initiated by Charlotte Fang, the founder of the NFT project Milady, and raised over $20 million, finally went live, briefly reminding people of NFT again, for details please refer to the article "CULT Goes Live, Is the Bull Market Ride of NFT Old-Timers Issuing Tokens the Last Dance?";
On December 10, the ME Foundation announced that the TGE has gone live, and users can claim and stake the ME token, with unclaimed ME tokens to be attributed to ME stakers.
On December 17, the Pudgy Penguins official announced that PENGU has gone live and is open for claiming, with eligible participants including Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgys, Rogs and SBT holders able to start claiming PENGU. Holders have 88 days to claim, and all unclaimed supply will be permanently locked/burned after the 88th day.
It is worth mentioning that the widespread market acceptance of the Pudgy Penguins token issuance is due to its large-scale airdrop of PENGU tokens not only to its own ecosystem, but also to the Solana ecosystem, many other NFT series holders, and even Ethereum ecosystem OG wallets.
At this time, as 2024 draws to a close, the suspense of token issuance in the NFT track is gradually being unveiled, with late entrants including the foundation registered in the Cayman Islands OpenSea, Azuki whose founder claims "Animecoin will have vision, product and real use case, different from other MEME coins", and even Doodles whose founder hinted that the project will soon issue tokens. But whether they can replicate the wealth creation miracle of Pudgy Penguins and PENGU remains to be seen.
Conclusion: When the NFT narrative is no longer sexy, token issuance becomes a double-edged sword
Finally, from an industry data perspective, according to CryptoSlam data, the total NFT sales in 2024 were around $8.5 billion, far below the peak of previous years, but the number of buyers grew by a rare over 62% to 7.5 million.
Although the NFT narrative is no longer as sexy as it was in 2022, able to attract hundreds of millions, billions or even tens of billions of dollars in investment, as a technology, it still occupies an indispensable position and role in the crypto market. Of course, for NFT projects, token issuance is not an all-win situation, but rather a double-edged sword with both advantages and disadvantages: if the token issuance goes smoothly, the token price is reasonable, and the market user returns are relatively satisfactory, then it is a win-win situation; but if the NFT project does not have a relatively clear and comprehensive plan, and regards token issuance as a "last resort", then the eventual outcome is most likely to be drowning in the water.
After going through a high start and low end, or more accurately a low start and low end phase, the NFT market can now be said to have entered a stage of bottoming out and rebounding. Whether it can usher in a new round of revival in 2025 still depends on the direction of the market narrative, the flow of funds, and the focus of attention.
But in any case, the story continues, and NFT will always be the endorphin that stimulates the constant fluctuations in the crypto market, and money will never sleep.
