NFT Market Jumps 10% to $77M as Buyers Flood Back In

Remember when everyone declared NFTs dead for the hundredth time? Yeah, me too. Yet here we are again, watching the market shrug off the obituaries and post a rather cheeky 9.78% gain in a single week. Seventy-seven million dollars changed hands. Buyers are back, transactions are spiking, and even the granddaddies of the space – CryptoPunks – are flexing a little muscle again.

Something shifted. You can feel it in the numbers, and honestly, you can almost feel it in the air if you spend too much time on Crypto Twitter. So let’s unpack what actually happened this past week, why it matters, and whether this is the genuine spark of a new cycle or just another fleeting pump.

The Big Picture: Buyers Are Voting With Their Wallets

The headline number is impressive enough on its own: total NFT sales volume hit $77.04 million, up from $72.53 million the previous week. That’s not earth-shattering in the grand scheme of 2021 mania, but in the context of the last 18 months of sideways-to-down action, it’s the kind of move that gets people paying attention again.

What I find far more interesting than the dollar figure, though, is who showed up. The number of unique buyers surged 25.34% to nearly 400,000 wallets. Sellers rose too, but only by 15.5%. That imbalance tells you everything: demand is outpacing supply right now. People aren’t just flipping whatever they have left in their wallets – new money is hunting for bags.

Transactions themselves exploded by almost 43%. When you see volume, buyers, and transaction count all moving in the same direction at the same time, you’re looking at real organic interest, not just a handful of whales moving expensive jpegs between their own wallets.

Top Collections: Familiar Names and New Rockets

Let’s run through the leaderboard, because it tells a fascinating story about where the heat actually is.

• Algebra Positions NFT-V2 on Ethereum held onto the crown with $9.6 million in volume – up a very healthy 35%. Still the king of whatever niche it serves (and honestly, I still don’t fully understand the mechanics, but the market clearly loves it).
• DMarket on Mythos Chain – the perpetual second-place contender – printed another $7.77 million. If you’ve been following these weekly reports, you know DMarket has basically lived in the top three for months. Consistency matters.
• Then things get spicy. DX Terminal on Base rocketed into third place with a ridiculous 456% weekly gain. Almost three million in volume and over 230,000 transactions. That’s not blue-chip behavior – that’s viral, FOMO-driven frenzy on a layer-2 that keeps proving the haters wrong.
• CryptoPunks quietly climbed back to $2.73 million. Nothing earth-shattering, but after months of looking like museum pieces, any green candle feels meaningful.
• Pudgy Penguins dipped slightly but still cleared $2.68 million. The floor is holding, the brand keeps expanding into real-world merchandise, and the community remains one of the most annoyingly loyal in the entire space.

The rest of the top ten was rounded out by Courtyard on Polygon and Guild of Guardians on Immutable – solid projects, gaming/utility focus, nothing too surprising there.

Blockchain Wars: Base Steals the Show

If you want one word to describe this week in NFTs, it’s Base.

Coinbase’s layer-2 solution posted a 201% increase in NFT volume, landing at $5.86 million. More importantly, it attracted over 109,000 unique buyers – a number that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago when people still dismissed Base as “just Friend.tech chains”.

Ethereum, as always, remains the undisputed heavyweight champion with $31.86 million, but its growth was a comparatively modest 6.5%. Mythos Chain grabbed second place overall, BNB Chain actually declined, and Bitcoin Ordinals held steady around $6.3 million.

Look at that buyer number for Base again. Over a hundred thousand unique wallets touched NFTs there in a single week. That’s not speculation – that’s adoption.

High-Value Sales: Punks Still Command Respect

At the very top of the individual sales chart, CryptoPunks reminded everyone why they’re the OG blue-chip collection. Punk #3720 changed hands for 110 ETH – roughly $308,000 at current prices. Four other Punks cracked the top ten most expensive sales of the week.

When a Punk moves for six figures in a “dead” market, people notice. It’s the NFT equivalent of a Bentley driving past your house – you can’t help but look.

Autoglyph #437 came in second at around $200k, but the rest of the leaderboard was pure Punk dominance. That kind of price action in the high-end segment usually signals confidence from deep-pocketed collectors who believe we’re closer to the bottom than the top.

Wash Trading Reality Check

Let’s not get carried away with hopium, though. Wash trading remains a stubborn reality, especially on certain chains. Base recorded over $5 million in suspicious volume, Polygon nearly $7 million. Those numbers inflate the totals and muddy the picture.

Still, even if we haircut the global figure by, say, 15-20% to account for the worst offenders, we’re still looking at genuine growth. The buyer surge and transaction explosion are much harder to fake at scale.

What Changed This Week?

Bitcoin breaking back above $90,000 certainly didn’t hurt. Risk-on assets tend to move together, and BTC crossing a psychologically important level tends to loosen purse strings across the ecosystem. Ethereum climbing above $3,000 again helped too – gas fees become slightly less painful, and suddenly minting or trading feels viable again.

But I suspect the real catalyst is simpler: boredom and FOMO. After months of nothing happening, any sign of life triggers a Pavlovian response in crypto natives. One viral collection on Base hits the timeline, a few influencers start posting receipts, and suddenly everyone’s checking OpenSea again “just to see.”

It’s the same pattern we’ve seen a dozen times before. The question is whether this iteration has legs.

Early Signs This Might Be Different

Here’s what gives me cautious optimism:

• The growth is broad-based – nearly every major chain posted more buyers.
• Gaming and utility projects (DMarket, Guild of Guardians, Courtyard) are driving real volume, not just PFPs.
• Base’s explosion suggests genuine retail is finding easy on-ramps.
• Blue-chips like Punks and Pudgy Penguins are at least stabilizing while new money flows into riskier bets – classic early-cycle behavior.

We’ve seen plenty of fake dawns before, but this one has a different flavor. The participation metrics are simply too strong to dismiss entirely.

What Comes Next?

Nobody knows, obviously. Markets love to humble anyone who claims certainty. But the setup feels familiar to anyone who lived through previous cycles. A quiet accumulation phase, a sudden volume spike, growing retail participation, and then… either a sustained bull run or another brutal fake-out.

My personal take? We’re probably somewhere in the “disbelief” stage that always follows bear markets. The smart money has been accumulating for months while everyone else screamed that NFTs were dead. Now retail is tiptoeing back in, and the question is whether projects can deliver enough real utility, entertainment, or community value to keep them around when the initial sugar rush fades.

Either way, one week doesn’t make a trend. But it’s enough to remind us that in crypto, things can turn on a dime. The NFT market just blinked. Whether it opens its eyes again remains to be seen.

For now, I’m keeping an eye on Base volume sustainability, CryptoPunks floor price action, and whether those 400,000 buyers stick around next week. Because if they do? We might actually have something here.