Floor Prices at Bored Apes Yacht Club Drop 33% Amid Swoon for NFT Projects

Uh-oh. Don’t look now but floor prices have been cut in half at many leading NFT projects this week. Trading volume is slowing down, too.

The floor at Bored Apes Yacht Club, the second highest ranking individual NFT project in terms of lifetime volume, has dropped by a third, to 29.47 from 44.05 ETH, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard.

It isn’t the only one: Meebits, the fourth highest ranking project, has a floor of 3.23 ETH, down more than 50% from a high of 7.50 ETH reached on Aug. 31, according to another Dune dashboard. LOOT’s floor is down about 80% from its Sep. 9 all-time, and Cool Cats has taken a 50% haircut.

The floors at 0N1 Force, Cryptoadz, Pudgy Penguins, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Mekaverse, are all at least 45% below their all-time high points, according to the dashboards. Investors focus on floors, the lowest level of value for NFTs at a given moment, to set prices.

Across the Board

That’s not all. NFT volume across the board has dropped 87%, to $48.48M, since an all-time high of $380.92M on Aug. 28. That’s when many of the top NFT projects’ floors peaked, according to a dashboard built by Dobby.

It’s hard to say what’s triggering the downward action. These moves do come during a week when ETH hit an all-time high of $4,361, according to CoinGecko. It may be painful to hold an asset bleeding against ETH, the currency typically used to buy NFTs. Then again, focusing on ETH’s performance might take some of the sting out of a worrisome stretch for NFT holders.

It’s possible the larger rally in the crypto market is dampening the attraction of NFTs as investors look elsewhere for gains. “Right now it’s probably really dead because ETH went up so much,” Soban Saqib, a Punk-holding NFT collector and co-founder of Ex Populus, a Web 3.0 game publishing company, told The Defiant.

“They might be rationalizing, the market is so frothy, if I take a 25% haircut on this, it doesn’t matter to me because I’ll go and two and three X my money right now on leverage or buying some alt coin,” Saqib said.

Wizard Cult

The collector is hanging tough with NFT blue chips. While Punks’ floor is at $387,575 as of Oct. 21, Saqib believes a $1M floor for the NFTs is imminent. He’s even looking to pick up some Cool Cats or Apes for cheap as hype leaves the market.

There continues to be bullish action in the space — Parallel, an NFT-based card game, announced an investment from valuation crypto investment firm Paradigm, which gave the project a $500M valuation on Oct. 21.

Forgotten Runes Wizard Cult too, another formidable NFT project with a respectable 0.90 ETH floor as of Oct. 21, announced a TV show in partnership with Emmy-award winning animation studio Titmouse.