A large majority of the NFT industry was founded in 2021, building on the progress from 2015-2020 or projects creating something new, and in 2022 NFTs already seemed poised to declare themselves as a unique asset class with many different types. They also seem to have grown to a large enough size as an industry that it seems reasonable to start tracking the market cap of segments over time. Given the early nature and difficulty in valuing no-fungible assets, we have gotten a varying range of answers as to the size of the NFT market.
The lines between NFTs and Metaverse assets and gaming assets becomes quite blurry upon closer look, with it being difficult to aggregate all sectors of NFTs to summate a total market cap. Data points include:
- NFTGo – $12.5B market cap
- Description: The sum of the last price of each NFT from all the collections listed on NFTGo.
- The growth has been exponential from an estimated $75M market cap in late Jan. 2021 to over $12B in late Jan. 2022.
- NFTgo has been the first source we’ve found that is estimating a total NFT collection market cap.
- Dappradar – $8B+ market cap
- Description: Market cap is equal to the floor price multiplied by the collection’s total supply
- CryptoSlate – $25.3B market cap for NFT coins
- CoinGecko – $28.7B market cap for NFT coins
- Jefferies Investment Bank forecast – $35B for 2022 and $80B for 2025
- SuperNiftyFan (Photography) – 13,965 ETH trading volume
- NFTValuations – $3.8B for CryptoPunks collection
- OpenSea (Series C) – $13.3B (Techcrunch)
- LooksRare launch – $700M
NFT Market Cap May. 2020 – present. How high can NFTs go before a local all-time high is set? Hard to tell if more NFTs keep being created.
Yesterday news broke that Bored Ape parent company Yuga Labs may be fundraising at a $5B valuation on the back of potentially $150M in first-year revenue, both recurring and one-time. Since launch, the collection has earned an estimated $55M in royalties on sales, sold out approximately $96M in Mutant Apes in Aug. 2021 as well as hosted events, sold merchandise and established partnerships. The $5B valuation would give Yuga Labs a price to sales (P/S) multiple of anywhere between 25x to 90x based on estimated recurring revenue of $55M to $200M respectively.
Nathan’s take: The current NFT market cap lies somewhere between $30B-$50B, and I expect it to reach greater than $100B in the coming 1-2 years. Much of this conviction is based on the sheer number of industries that NFTs can touch including art, video, music, fashion, photography, writing, esports, gaming and more, and the ability for NFTs to tokenise both the real-world side of these industries, but also develop the new digital side as well.