NFT Market Made Over $16 Billion in Sales Despite Crypto Bloodbath

The NFT market seems to have recorded nice numbers over January despite the crypto meltdown witnessed over the last few weeks.

According to DappRadar, a global decentralized applications store, the NFT sphere made around $16 billion in trades during that month.

LooksRare, a newcomer in the industry, accounted for $10.7 billion of the total NFT trading volume in January, doubling other NFT marketplaces together, as OpenSea just caught $4.7 billion. However, LooksRare’s performance can be attributed to its token reward program’s incentivization.

2021 Bullish Momentum Alive

Still, just 35,000 traders handled transactions through such a platform, which is a very low number compared to the major NFT marketplace OpenSea, with over half a million.

“The past couple of months have been rather bleak for anyone holding crypto, but the blockchain industry’s performance is a bright light at the end of the tunnel. The numbers we’re seeing this month demonstrate stability and growing maturity for the space, which will eventually counteract the negative market sentiment,” Modesta Masoit, Head of Finance and Research at DappRadar, pointed out.

Overall, the NFT industry keeps its bullish momentum alive from 2021 – a year where it witnessed over $25 billion in sales against the previous four years combined.

Blockchain Gaming Keeps Booming

On other fronts, blockchain gaming’s usage keeps gathering steam, as in the last quarter of 2021, 52% of the nearly 2.5 million unique active wallets connecting to dApps in January interact with games, the January 2022 Dapp Industry Report highlighted.

In an announcement made, GameStop highlighted its partnership with Immutable X. With this partnership, GameStop plans on drawing developers towards its upcoming NFT marketplace.

With this partnership, Immutable X, which is the first layer 2 for NFTs on Ethereum, will also act as a layer 2 partner and platform for GameStop.

Gamestop aims at banking on this exactly as the upcoming marketplace from Gamestop is aimed at including ‘billions’ of low-cost in-game items that can also be traded.