NFT Marketplace Pivot Shows NFTs Are Really Dead

Camila Russo & Olivia Capozzalo
May 30, 2025

gm Defiers!

Today’s big story:

• OpenSea joins the legacy NFT marketplaces pivoting to the DEX game

Plus:

• Markets dip on U.S.-China trade tensions
• Congress introduces market structure bill
• SEC says staking isn’t a securities transaction
• XRP’s turn: Two firms announce corporate treasuries
• Solving Liquidity Fragmentation with Soul Protocol [SPONSORED]

Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.

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NFT Marketplaces Attempt to Regain Relevance with Token Trading

The onetime king of monkey JPEGs has pulled the ripcord: today’s public rollout of OS2 recasts OpenSea as a multichain DEX where traders can swap from NFT monkeys, to memecoin frogs, to plain old ETH and SOL.

It’s a daring attempt to revive a market that has shrunk to a sliver of its 2021 girth. Yet history says universal hubs often end up pleasing no one. Whether OS2 dodges that curse hinges on the next few quarters.

The upgrade bolts additional trading and rewards tools to the familiar NFT gallery UI. Users now:

• Earn “Voyages” XP for on-chain tasks, a clear pre-airdrop funnel for the long-teased $SEA token (which still has no date).
• Swap fungible tokens and NFTs across 19 networks (Ethereum, Solana, Base, Ronin, more) from one checkout flow.
• Track portfolio P/L in a unified dashboard.

Magic Eden’s Slingshot moment

In April, the Solana and Bitcoin-focused NFT marketplace Magic Eden bought crypto-trading app Slingshot, grafting support for 8 million fungible tokens and a universal USDC balance into its front end. The team touted a bridgeless swap experience across “almost every major chain,” for the third-largest NFT marketplace after OpenSea and Blur.

Everyone’s Doing It

A clutch of smaller venues has already sprinted down the same path. Sudoswap’s v2 “VeryFastRouter” ripped out the old NFT-only plumbing and now swaps any mix of ERC-20s, ERC-721s or ERC-1155s in a single hop. On Solana, Tensor kept its pro NFT order-book but spun out Vector, a TikTok-style SocialFi app where traders broadcast positions, copy-trade memecoins and route orders through Jupiter and Raydium.

The pivot isn’t limited to EVM and Solana. UniSat, born as a Bitcoin-Ordinals bazaar, now defaults to BRC-20 memecoin order books—letting users mint, list and swap fungible tokens beside their inscriptions. Meanwhile, OKX’s Ordinals Market baked full BRC-20 orderbooks into its wallet UI, giving its 50-million exchange users a one-click path from BTC NFTs to fungible meme-tokens.

Zora’s reinvention is the most radical: each social post now mints a one-billion-supply, fungible token, where likes act as micro-buys, and creators skim 1% on every trade. The 10 billion-supply $ZORA token launched on Base in April.

Why they had to pivot — the NFT crash in numbers

• Total NFT sales cratered from $4.1 B (Q1 2024) to $1.5 B (Q1 2025), a 63 % YoY drop.
• Art-NFT turnover imploded 93 %, plunging from $2.9 B at the 2021 peak to just $23.8 M this March.
• Active wallets collapsed 96%, from 529K peak traders to 19.5K.
• Blue-chip floors mirror the carnage: CryptoPunks sit at 43 ETH, down 61 % from their 114 ETH all-time high.

OpenSea’s Gamble is Paying Off

NFTScan and DeFiLLama data show that OpenSea is capturing 37% of the 30-day volume, surpassing Blur’s 27% and outpacing Magic Eden’s 7.7%.

But it’s a bigger slice of a shrinking pie. Total NFT volume in May at $100 million is 77% lower than a year ago and 95% lower than the 2023 high, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard. Look at volume, wallets, number of buys, and floor prices across all collections, and the conclusion is the same: the NFT market collapsed and has so far failed to recover.

Will “trade-everything” hubs really lure crypto traders?

So it’s clear that NFT marketplaces are aiming to capture crypto traders’ attention by courting the deepest, noisiest flow they can find.

What’s unclear to me is why a trader would want to swap non-NFT assets in a (former?) NFT marketplace. For majors (BTC, ETH, SOL), deep books live on Coinbase, Binance or perp venues like Hyperliquid. On the long tail of tokens, Uniswap owns Ethereum, Jupiter and Raydium own Solana, and pumpfun spits out fresh memecoins hourly.

OS2’s single dashboard looks slick, and to some users, it may be convenient to find all types of tokens in one place. Time will tell whether this strategy is a survival tactic or silver bullet. I think this will be one of many future tweaks and pivots until NFT marketplaces find the right way to repurpose themselves. Or who knows, maybe NFTs end up making a comeback.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

📈 Markets in the last 24 hrs:

	TICKER	VALUE	24H
	Bitcoin	$104,689	-1.71 %
	Ethereum	$2,568.36	-3.39 %
	XRP	$2.19	-3.84 %
	BNB	$666.23	-1.87 %
	Solana	$160.25	-5.14 %

1. Markets continued dip today, with most large-cap assets in the red and total market cap shedding 4.5% after President Trump accused China of violating a preliminary trade agreement.
2. Yesterday, Rep. French Hill, a known crypto advocate in Congress, introduced a long-awaited crypto market structure bill, the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which seeks to place crypto regulation primarily under the CFTC.
3. The U.S. SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance made a statement about staking on proof-of-stake networks, clarifying that what it dubs “protocol staking” is not a securities transaction. SEC Commissioner Peirce called the statement “welcome clarity for stakers and ‘staking-as-a-service’ providers in the United States.”
4. In the past two days, two firms have announced they will create XRP corporate treasuries, stockpiling a combined over $400 million in XRP; the move comes as new players, such as SharpLink Gaming and Paris Saint-Germain F.C., enter the ETH and BTC corporate treasury game this week.

🎬WATCH

In our latest video, we take a look at how stablecoins are bridging the gap between traditional financial systems and digital currencies, making everyday crypto adoption more accessible for businesses and consumers alike.

Earlier this month, payments giant Stripe, which processed $1.4 trillion in payments volume in 2024, announced that it’s stepping into the world of stablecoins with its new Stablecoin Financial Accounts.

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