Mapping the NFT Revolution
Market trends, trade networks, and visual features
About the Project
Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that represent objects like art, collectibles, and in-game items. They are traded online, often with cryptocurrency, and are generally encoded within smart contracts on a blockchain. Public attention towards NFTs has exploded in 2021, when their market experienced record sales, but little was known about the overall structure and evolution of its market.
We analysed data concerning 6.1 million trades of 4.7 million NFTs between June 23, 2017 and April 27, 2021, obtained primarily from Ethereum and WAX blockchains. First, we characterized statistical properties of the market. Second, we built the network of interactions, showing that traders typically specialize on NFTs associated with similar objects and form tight clusters with other traders that exchange the same kind of objects.
Third, we clustered objects associated to NFTs according to their visual features and showed that collections contain visually homogeneous objects. Finally, we investigated the predictability of NFT sales using simple machine learning algorithms and found that sale history and, secondarily, visual features are good predictors for price.
