World weekly total non-fungible token (NFT) sales fell 72% this week compared to the previous week, with the number of unique buyers increasing by 75%, after cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase introduced its own layer 2 blockchain that comes with Free NFT airdrop.
NFT’s total weekly sales fell to US$203 million in the seven days from February 24 to March 2, from US$747 million the previous week, according to data from the NFT aggregation site CryptoSlam.
Notably, the number of unique buyers strengthened to a record high of 165,840 on February 26, and the weekly total rose 74.9% from the previous week. The total number of unique sellers, however, fell by 12.7%.
“Amazingly, new buyers are really all organic and have nothing to do with blur gamification as you might initially expect,” said Yehudah Petscher, NFT Relationship Strategist at Cryptoslam.
Petscher said Coinbase’s blockchain relaunch could go a long way in boosting the number of unique buyers.
Coinbase last week base launcheda new Layer 2 network and Free NFTs airdropped called “Base, Introduced”.
“The catch is that you can only collect one (NFT) per wallet,” Petscher said. “The action we’re seeing is either traders creating multiple wallets to claim the NFT, or it’s possible we also have an influx of people that Coinbase is introducing NFTs to recently.”
Petscher added, “If we see NFT volume increasing over the next few months, we can start to speculate that we have indeed had an influx of new NFT traders.”
Meanwhile, CryptoSlam detected last week at least 577 million US dollars of NFTs traded linked to the marketplace, Blur.io, since the launch of the platform airdrop its native tokens on February 14. This suggested that some Blur users were selling NFTs to each other using different wallets to acquire Blur tokens and accumulate points for airdrops.
Sham trading, which is illegal in US stock markets, refers to an investor acting as both a buyer and seller of a financial instrument to generate misleading trading volume and potentially manipulate prices.
Petscher said on Thursday that, for the most part, “it now seems like traders have ignored the noise of the washout trade.”
“Education always leads to smarter trading, so hopefully we’re starting to see the beginnings of smarter trading,” he added.