Every time I check the NFT numbers lately I feel like I’m watching the same movie on repeat: “flat volume, but wait, something is moving underneath.” This week was exactly that story again.
Total NFT sales clocked in at $77.10 million – basically identical to last week’s $77.04 million. A yawn-worthy 1.77% bump, right? Yet when you zoom out a little, the picture changes fast. Almost half a million people (490,600 to be exact) decided this was the week to buy an NFT. That’s a 23.45% jump in buyers. Sellers rose too, but “only” 15%. Transactions actually fell 19%, which tells me people are getting pickier – fewer flips, more deliberate purchases.
In plain English: the crowd is growing, but the money isn’t spreading thin. It’s concentrating. And that, in my experience, is usually the quiet phase right before something catches fire.
The Real Story Isn’t the Headline Number
Headlines love big round numbers. “NFT market dead” or “NFTs back!” – both sell clicks. Reality is almost always messier and, frankly, more interesting.
Let me walk you through what actually happened this week, chain by chain and collection by collection, because the devil (and the alpha) is always in the details.
Top Collections – Same Kings, New Contenders
DMarket on Mythos kept the crown with $6.73 million, even if that was down 13% from the week before. Still impressive volume for an in-game item marketplace that most casual observers completely ignore.
The real fireworks came in second place. Guild of Guardians Heroes on Immutable absolutely exploded – up 162% to $5.46 million. I’ve been watching Immutable quietly for months, and every time a solid game launches there the numbers follow. This feels like the first domino.
Algebra Positions (the NFT representation of Uniswap v3 liquidity positions) took a brutal 54% haircut and fell to third. That drop probably says more about DeFi summer cooling off than about NFTs themselves.
Courtyard on Polygon climbed to fourth with a healthy 39% gain, while Gods Unchained Cards delivered the week’s biggest percentage move – up a ridiculous 253% to $2.43 million. Gaming NFTs quietly having their best stretch since 2022, anyone?
Even Panini America on its own blockchain posted almost $2.3 million after a 298% surge. Sports collectibles never really went away; they just waited for the hype to die down so real fans could buy in peace.
Blue-chips told a different story. Pudgy Penguins slipped 15%, CryptoPunks dropped 24%. The rich-list holders aren’t panic selling, but they’re definitely not rushing to buy either. Classic consolidation behavior.
Blockchain Leaderboard – Immutable Steals the Show
Ethereum still wears the volume crown ($27.3M), but it bled 13.5% week-over-week and carried almost $4.6 million in obvious wash trading. Not exactly a picture of health.
Meanwhile Immutable rocketed 148% to $8.51 million and grabbed second place overall. That’s not noise – that’s signal. Every time a layer-2 built specifically for gaming starts moving up the rankings, I pay attention.
- BNB Chain – steady at $7.73M (+3.5%)
- Bitcoin – $7.19M (+17.6%) thanks to Ordinals and BRC-20 NFTs
- Mythos – $6.88M (down slightly but still top 5)
- Polygon – $4.38M (+24%)
- Solana – $4.03M (basically flat)
Notice anything? Almost every gaming-focused chain is green. Ethereum and Solana, the former volume monsters, are treading water.
The $809K Sale That Stopped Twitter Scrolling
One single transaction stole the show: a BRC-20 NFT called $X@AI sold for 8.7195 BTC – roughly $809,337 at the time. That’s the biggest individual NFT sale in weeks and a reminder that Bitcoin Ordinals still have serious whale money behind them.
CryptoPunks grabbed the next four spots on the top-sales list, proving that even in a quiet market the true blue-chips still move for six figures when the right one hits the block.
When a random BRC-20 inscription out-sells every Punk except the rarest ones, you know we’re in a strange, beautiful phase of the market.
So… Is This the Bottom or Just Another Dead-Cat Bounce?
Here’s my personal take after watching these weekly reports for three years straight.
Flat headline volume with exploding buyer count almost always precedes a real move. The 2021 bull run didn’t start with $500M weeks – it started with weeks exactly like this one, where the “smart money” quietly accumulated while everyone else called it dead.
Gaming chains taking four of the top seven blockchains by volume isn’t random. Real utility (playable games, actual in-game assets, real yield) is finally showing up, and the market is rewarding it.
Wash trading on Ethereum is still ugly, but it’s shrinking as a percentage of total volume. That’s healthy cleansing.
Put it all together and I’m leaning toward “we’re in the boring middle phase of a much larger cycle.” Not financial advice, obviously – just pattern recognition from someone who’s been staring at these numbers too long.
The next few weeks will tell us everything. If Immutable and Mythos keep climbing the leaderboard while buyer count stays north of 450k, I’d get very interested very quickly.
Until then, the market is doing exactly what healthy markets do – consolidating, rotating into new narratives, and letting the tourists leave before the next leg up.
Or maybe I’m wrong and we’ll be looking at $50M weeks by February. Either way, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than the “NFTs are dead” headlines from six months ago.
One thing I know for sure – the people still paying attention right now are the exact same people who will be insufferable when the headlines flip back to “NFTs are back!” in 2026.
See you on the other side.
