Ethereum NFT Prices Bounce Back After Crypto Crash—But Azuki Keeps Tanking – Decrypt

In brief

Many of the most valuable and in-demand NFT collections saw rapidly declining price points yesterday as the fear and uncertainty surrounding the cryptocurrency market crash appeared to pour into the tokenized collectibles space as well.

Today, however, many of those NFT projects have regained significant value, with one very clear exception: Azuki, an Ethereum profile picture collection that has been dogged by controversy over the past day.

Data from NFT Price Floor shows that the floor price—or cheapest available NFT listed on a secondary market—for projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Moonbirds, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Clone X, and Doodles have all bounced back by double-digit percentages when measured in terms of U.S. dollars, per data from NFT Price Floor.

On one hand, the rising valuations are tied to the price of Ethereum, which has risen a bit from yesterday’s low just above $2,200. Right now, the price of ETH sits around $2,300. But that’s not the whole story, as many collections’ lowest-priced NFTs are still up significantly when measured entirely in ETH.

Moonbirds, the hot new project launched last month by tech entrepreneur Kevin Rose and his PROOF Collective, has seen one of the largest single-day bouncebacks among so-called “blue chip” NFT projects.

As of this writing, the floor price for Moonbirds sits at 25 ETH (about $58,000), which marks a 41% rise in value over the past 24 hours in terms of USD value. Perhaps due to its relative recency, Moonbirds was hit harder yesterday, reaching a low of about 17 ETH.

Measured in USD, the Bored Ape Yacht Club floor is up 15% today to $230,000 (99.8 ETH), Mutant Apes are up 23% to above $52,000 (22.5 ETH), and Otherdeed virtual land deeds for the upcoming Otherside metaverse game—from the Bored Ape creators—are up 12% to nearly $6,900 (nearly 3 ETH).

CryptoPunks have seen a more modest bump at 5% to just over $123,000 (about 53 ETH), while Meebits have popped up 28% to $13,400 (5.8 ETH).

An NFT acts like a blockchain-backed receipt to a digital item, and can represent things like one-of-a-kind profile pictures, digital illustrations, sports collectibles, and more.

Azuki crumbles

Among popular NFT collections, Azuki is the odd project out today. Following controversy about past NFT projects that one founder had not previously disclosed a connection to, as well as use of other pseudonyms, Azuki’s floor price has lost 43% of its USD value over the past 24 hours, dropping to about $24,000 (10.4 ETH).

While leading NFT marketplace OpenSea had its lowest single day of Ethereum NFT trading volume on Sunday, with just $52.3 million worth recorded by analytics platform Dune, it saw a bounce-back on Monday to about $83.4 million.

Azuki NFTs, in particular, have been hot sellers over the past 24 hours as holders bail out and newcomers hope they score a deal on an until-recently blazing hot profile picture collection. CryptoSlam reports nearly $45 million worth of Azuki sales over the last 24 hours across all marketplaces—a 734% increase over the previous period.

Despite some collections’ aforementioned price gains over the past day, top project the Bored Ape Yacht Club is still well off its peak price. A Bored Ape NFT started at $429,000 (or 152 ETH) on April 29, one day before the controversial—yet highly successful—Otherdeeds launch.

As of now, the starting price of a Broad Ape Yacht Club NFT is still down about 46% (in USD) in less than two weeks. One day ago, however, it was down 55% from the peak.

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