NFT summer is not gone, it’s just shifting? NFT transaction volume on Polygon exceeds $1.2 billion, becoming a new sinking market

Author: Cookie
When it comes to NFT, everyone’s attention is undoubtedly focused on ETH first, followed by Solana. Bitcoin NFT, which has just emerged this year, is also highly discussed. Even Layer2’s Arbitrum has had high expectations from NFT players due to the popularity of Beacon and even Magic ecosystems.
In contrast, the discussion of Polygon’s NFT market is much less, and it seems to be unknown. Yesterday, DeGods’ NFT series y00ts also announced that it would migrate from Polygon to the ETH mainnet and return the $3 million funding from Polygon. This seems to indicate that the Polygon NFT market is sluggish.
In fact, the total historical transaction volume of the Polygon NFT market ranks fifth among all blockchain networks. If we remove "Axie game chains" such as Ronin and "NFT-specific chains" such as Flow, Polygon is second only to ETH and Solana.
In the past 30 days, the total transaction volume of the Polygon NFT market ranked third, and the gap with Solana’s total transaction volume is very small. Considering that the total transaction volume of Bitcoin NFT includes a lot of BRC-20 Token transaction volume, Polygon can be said to be at the level of "stable 3 and grab 2".
Will the Polygon NFT market replicate the success of the Solana NFT market? What projects are worth paying attention to in the current Polygon NFT market?
Another “NFT sinking market” after Solana?
The first real wave of "going out of the circle" in the Solana NFT market was the rapid surge of Okay Bears at the end of April 2022. As Okay Bears attracted a lot of market attention, projects such as Degods and Solana Monkey Business also "went out of the circle", forming a "blue chip echelon" in the Solana NFT market.
At that time, the ETH NFT market and even the entire Crypto market were in a downward trend, but the Solana NFT market rose against the trend. Most importantly, "going out of the circle" has brought "attention" to Solana NFT, which makes everyone believe that they can make money whether looking for potential new "blue chips" or sniping "non-blue chip" opportunities brought about by increased liquidity in the short term. Low handling fees and cheap launch prices for new projects make Solana NFT a "lottery ticket" with better potential returns - after all, on ETH, it is difficult for you to catch the next CryptoPunks or BAYC, and these projects are too expensive for newcomers. And new projects are not cheap, and the ceiling for growth can be seen, just like a gold mine that has been mined almost.
Now let’s take a look at the Polygon NFT marketplace.
On the B-side, many Web2 giants have settled in the Polygon NFT market.
"Starbucks Odyssey", an extension of Starbucks Rewards, the Starbucks loyalty reward mechanism, is built on Polygon. The current total market value on the market exceeds US$9 million, the secondary market transaction volume exceeds US$2.5 million, and a total of more than 210,000 "Journey Stamps" NFTs have been minted.
 Starbucks Odyssey
Nike's NFT platform .SWOOSH is built on Polygon, and the first digital sneaker series "Our Force 1" launched on it has sold more than 97,000 copies and generated sales of more than $1.9 million. In June of this year, Nike Virtual Studios also announced a partnership with video game giant EA Sports to introduce Polygon NFTs and digital content on the Nike .SWOOSH platform into EA's gaming ecosystem.
 「Our Force 1」
Reddit's Collectible Avatar has been released to the 4th generation on the Polygon network, with a total market value of more than 50 million US dollars, sales of more than 40 million US dollars, and nearly 16 million holders, making it the NFT series with the largest number of holders in the world.
 Reddit「Collectible Avatar」
Game NFTs on Polygon also performed well. Looking at the data on the chain alone, the top two projects in Polygon NFT’s historical transaction volume are both game NFTs.
ZED RUN, ranked No. 1, is a horse racing game where players can borrow or buy their own horses for free, train them, and then compete against other players’ horses. According to the project’s official website, its brand sponsors include Budweiser, Atari, and Netflix. According to Cryptoslam data, the project’s total transaction volume exceeded $200 million.
 ZED RUN
DraftKings, ranked second, had a trading volume of $6.7 million in 7 days, accounting for about 35% of the total historical trading volume. The recent rapid growth in trading volume has recently led DraftKings to be described as "NBA Top Shot on Polygon." DraftKings Marketplace is an NFT market built by DraftKings (NASDAQ: DKNG) for "the masses", which sells star cards, Reignmakers football, golf and UFC operating game assets, and some virtual and real products.
 DraftKings Marketplace
@0xobsessed classified the game projects on Polygon, covering more than 150 games built on Polygon. There are really a lot of games.
It can be said that the Polygon NFT market is an NFT market that is "not what we imagined Web3 to be". In terms of "mass-oriented" products and game products, Polygon has gone further than ETH and Solana. The common features are closed markets, providing users with custodial wallets, and supporting/only supporting legal currency payments. At this stage, these B-side achievements have not been able to convert Web2 users to Web3 to help Polygon build its own Web3 NFT community and even culture like Solana.
On the C-side, the Polygon NFT market has not seen the situation where NFT projects have detonated the entire ecosystem like Solana did before. Although there are "branch lines" of ETH's first-line PFP projects such as CyberKongz VX, mature metaverse lands that have migrated from The Sandbox, and utility NFT projects such as "Trump Digital Trading Cards", the first NFT series of former US President Donald Trump, which has a strong meme flavor and has attracted a lot of attention, there has never been a "star" in the PFP type. Due to the departure of y00ts, there has been a vacuum on the throne of PFP projects on Polygon NFT. There is reason to expect that this vacuum will be filled in the future and the grand occasion of "Polygon NFT Season" will appear.
Although there are reasons to expect the emergence of the "Polygon NFT Season", it is also undeniable that the times are different now. First of all, the overall situation of the Crypto market is more bearish than when the "Solana NFT Summer" appeared, and secondly, NFT players' interest and trust in the PFP narrative have almost disappeared. If we want to see the emergence of the "Polygon NFT Season", we may first expect the overall warming of the Crypto market, with sufficient liquidity to support the wealth effect on Polygon NFT.
Polygon NFT project PFP worth paying attention to
After y00ts' departure, the most noteworthy Polygon PFP project is Pluto Misfits.
 Pluto Misfits
Pluto Misfits is an officially recommended project of Polygon, led by Polygon Ventures, and angel investors from Polygon co-founders Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani. The specific amount of the investment was not disclosed, but the valuation was $15 million.
Sandeep Nailwal not only invested but also personally scanned 100 Pluto Misfits. On Twitter, many Polygon team members have changed their avatars to Pluto Misfits, such as CEO @0xMarcB, investment director @shreyansh_27, growth director (NFT, DeFi, DAO, Tokenization) @sourcex44, BD director (NFT) @glabuz, senior assistants @rainyreece_ and @Smokey_titan, social media staff @itsNikkiLOL, etc.
After Pluto Misfits was released, Polygon Ventures posted a congratulatory message
Pluto Misfits is the first project incubated by Magic Batch, which is also supported by Polygon Ventures. Magic Batch members include Polygon co-founders Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani, Pluto Misfits co-founders @dostmalonee (who founded Asia's largest creator incubator Nofiltr, which has cooperated with more than 700 brands such as Netflix, Uber and NBA, covering a user base of more than 150 million) and @rjun_eth, Pluto Misfits product manager @rashdriving_, Polygon early investor @RahulDLM, Memeland core team member @0xChar, etc. Magic Batch calls Pluto Misfits the "Polygon NFT flagship."
The total number of Pluto Misfits is 4444, and the selling price is 99 Matic. The current floor price has reached 288 Matic. It is worth mentioning that Pluto Misfits has risen instead of falling after the chart was opened, and the overall trend is stable and upward.
Pluto Misfits Price Chart
The Pluto Misfits community has a good atmosphere and high trust in the team. Currently, Pluto Misfits can be pledged to harvest "mushrooms", and the specific use of "mushrooms" has not yet been disclosed.
 game
What I am most looking forward to is of course MapleStory N, which will be built on the Polygon Supernet. MapleStory N is the blockchain version of the classic 2D online game "MapleStory". BlockBeats has previously introduced MapleStory N in detail.
Another game worth paying attention to is Mojo Melee. This is an auto chess game that has been listed on Amazon Prime Game and will issue Gwyn Rockhopper NFT and 850 ORE (in-game currency, non-chain assets) to Amazon Prime users. Mystic Moose behind Mojo Melee completed a $5 million seed round of financing in December 2021, led by Animoca Brands, with participation from Courtside Ventures, Republic Crypto, Alameda, AU21, Sfermion, Polygon Studios, Collab+Currency, Sky Vision Capital, Spartan Capital, HyperEdge, Momentum6 and Fourth Revolution Capital.
Mojo Melee Utility
FireDrops is a brand loyalty rewards platform where users can complete loyalty tasks given by their favorite brands, such as social media participation, product purchases, user recommendations, and other brand tasks. By completing loyalty tasks, users can get rewards such as cash discounts, free products, priority experience rights, and of course, NFTs. Users will be able to trade these rewards on the built-in market in the future.
This sounds like Starbucks Odyssey, a Web2.5 loyalty rewards product, but it will cover a much wider range than Starbucks Odyssey. Currently, you can apply to join the waiting list on the FireDrops official website. According to the official disclosure, more than 1 million users have applied.
FireDrops by Flipkart NFT Marketplace
Under OpenSea, the second largest NFT trading market on Polygon is dew. Similar to Blur, dew is both an NFT aggregator and an NFT market, but it is not as comprehensive as Blur and needs to be improved. Even so, the current user experience of dew is still very good.
The interface of dew shows that dew has firmly occupied the second place in the Polygon NFT trading market.
According to the official disclosure of dew, dew has received investment from institutions such as Polygon Labs and Circle, but the specific amount of financing is unknown. At present, the first round of dew's token airdrop activity has ended, and the second round of token airdrop activity is about to start. The details of the activity have not yet been disclosed.
Conclusion
At this stage, Polygon NFT has outstanding performance in the development of Web2 giants and the development of the game ecosystem. Coupled with the previous announcement of Polygon 2.0 ($POL), some NFT players are highly optimistic about the development of the Polygon NFT market, and even proposed the "Polygon NFT Q4 Moon Landing Theory" based on these points:
However, we need to make two points clear. First, the "moon landing" here refers to Polygon NFT developing a solid community (player group) and a distinctive player culture like ETH and Solana. The more direct manifestation is that the PFP-type NFTs familiar to Crypto players develop "out-of-circle blue chips", and a large number of Web3 native NFT players can enter the market to seek gold. Secondly, to attract Web3 native NFT players, the most needed thing at this stage is the "wealth effect", and the large number of Web2 users accumulated by Polygon NFT cannot be attracted into the Web3 world in a short period of time. The markets of giants such as Starbucks and Nike are like "independent kingdoms" in the Polygon NFT market. Web2 users are still blocked by their closed markets. Whether they can successfully introduce incremental users to Web3 users in the future remains to be seen.
New markets are always full of opportunities, and there is no real Polygon-native "blue chip" yet, which gives us enough room for imagination. Polygon seems to be just like Solana at the time, with everything ready, except for an "east wind" like Okay Bears. Will we see the emergence of the "Polygon NFT Season"?