The year 2024 is coming to a close. As we approach the end of 2024, the airdrops of Magic Eden's token $ME and the collective recovery of ETH's "old blue chips," especially the sunny airdrop of "chonky penguin" Pudgy Penguins' token $PENGU, have brought a real wealth effect, drawing much-needed attention to the NFT market.

What a year it has been for NFTs! BlockBeats is here to take you through the past 12 months of the NFT market. After reflecting on the NFT market of 2024 with us, how would you rate the performance of the NFT market in 2024?

January: The Beginning of a Tripartite World, the End of the "Hexagon Avatar"

In December 2023, Solana NFTs achieved a monthly total trading volume of approximately $3.65 billion, slightly surpassing Ethereum's approximately $3.63 billion. Looking back, this marked the beginning of a tripartite NFT world with Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin (Ordinals). Despite Ethereum reaffirming its dominance at the end of the year through an absolute monopoly on the top market-value NFT projects and player volume, proving itself to still be the reigning chain of the NFT world, if we rewind time back to January of this year, 2024, the NFT market had to navigate through a tripartite world for the whole year.

Ethereum NFTs kicked off the year with the "retro Mickey Mouse." As U.S. law only allows ownership of a copyright for 95 years, in January of this year, the old-version Mickey Mouse copyright was no longer owned by Disney and became open to the public. Thus, we saw "Mickey Mouse" dominating on OpenSea.

However, following that was some bad news—Twitter discontinued the ability to use NFTs as Twitter avatars. This seemed to tell us that apart from the crypto players, nobody in the world would care whether an avatar was worth 10 or 10,000. Nonetheless, do you still remember the era of the "hexagon avatar"?

The star projects of this month included:

- Pizza Ninjas (Bitcoin Ordinals), another Tier 1 project in the Bitcoin ecosystem was born.

- RSIC (Bitcoin Ordinals), the most popular pre-mined runestone NFT series before the launch of the runestone protocol quietly airdropped, sparking a trend in runestone pre-mining.

- Tinfun (Ethereum, later migrated to Blast), the power of the Chinese community, rekindling the glory of the Ethereum mainnet.

- ittybits (Ethereum Pictogram), a 10x opportunity in a niche track, driving the overall rise of the Ethereum Pictogram miniatures, but unfortunately lost momentum later on.

- CryptoUndeads (Solana), a Cabal project that managed to make a huge profit through a presale, swiftly passing like a meteor.

February: ERC-404 "Pandora's Box," Yuga Labs Acquires "Moonbirds"

The concept of "coin-nft integration" shone brightly in early February. The first project of ERC-404, "Pandora's Box," was undoubtedly the absolute star of early February, having experienced a near 30x surge.

At that time, we had such a vision—

ERC-404 directly shaped a "coin-nft symbiosis" that can be traded on CEX and is disruptive to existing NFTfi products. By introducing an oracle, leveraging native ERC-404 NFTs is also straightforward (direct long/short on ERC-20 Tokens), and direct lending is no longer the form of storing tiny images in a designated address; operations can be directly performed based on ERC-20 Tokens.

However, this vision has not materialized, but instead, the later popular Hybrid "coin-nft mix" model on Solana, where the rise of meme coins drives the NFT series with community cult attributes, demonstrated a dual liquidity spiral effect.

In February, Yuga Labs announced the acquisition of the Moonbirds development team PROOF, owning top-tier NFT IPs/projects such as CryptoPunks, BAYC, MAYC, BAKC, "Monkeyverse" Otherdeed, Meebits, Moonbirds, becoming an NFT "giant." At that time, our point of view was—

Yuga Labs is no longer cool, and the time left for Yuga Labs to contemplate might not be much; this will be a race against the bull market.

Looking at it now, the attention and excellent market performance Pudgy Penguins and Doodles received at the end of the year provide evidence for this viewpoint.

This month's featured new projects include:

- Quantum Cats (Bitcoin Ordinals), despite some initial market controversy due to its 0.1 Bitcoin price, the current price of 0.3 Bitcoin has solidified this project's status as a blue-chip Bitcoin NFT.

March: Blast Mainnet Launch, Runestone Airdrop Sparks Rune Craze

The Blast mainnet went live on March 1st, marking the "first shot" of the March NFT market. However, the standout of the month was Bitcoin Ordinals.

It started with the rise of the "DMT (an idea that has spawned a form of generative art based on Bitcoin block data)" concept since the end of February. As the flagship of the DMT concept, Natcats set a single-sale record of 1.3 Bitcoin before even listing any Bitcoin NFT on any market.

Next was the mid-March Runestone airdrop, this massive airdrop covered over 112,000 Bitcoin addresses, quickly becoming the 3rd highest total value NFT series across all chains in just two days. It is also the predecessor of today's top-ranking rune, $DOG.

The impact of the Runestone airdrop on the Bitcoin ecosystem is profound. "Free, fair, big rigs," these three keywords have been a significant evaluation criterion for whether an ecosystem project in Bitcoin Ordinals is excellent for a considerable period of time this year.

Meanwhile, on Solana, Mad Lads peaked this month as holders eagerly await their Wormhole airdrop.

Overall, it was a quite lively month, but there were disappointments too. Starbucks' NFT loyalty rewards program on Polygon, "Starbucks Odyssey," announced its closure at the end of this month, and Kevin Rose also sparked controversy for selling a bunch of small pictures.

This month's featured new projects include:

- Runestone (Bitcoin Ordinals), where the Rune saga begins with this stone.

- CENTS (Bitcoin Ordinals), 10,000 post-minted penny coins that have become the most valuable art series on the Bitcoin market.

- Plutocats (Blast), quite similar to Nouns on Blast, surged in value due to receiving a Blast Gold distribution far higher than other NFT projects.

- Crypto Valley (Blast), this farming game initially released 1,500 free "farmer" roles, causing a FOMO at one point, but has since fallen into obscurity.

April: Bitcoin Halving and Base NFT Growth

One notable new project in March should also include XCOPY's release of the Open Edition series "MUTATIO" on Base, which sold 1,023,831 copies during a 2-day minting period, generating over 700 ETH in total sales.

What really caught fire was the meme token $FLIES launched in April by the project's community under XCOPY's endorsement, which led to a price surge.

On the Blast network, the "friend trading" game fantasy.top continued to be popular.

Of course, the Bitcoin network remained the hottest. An Epic Satoshi was sold for 33.3 BTC and gave birth to a Satoshi Rune. It seemed like everything in the Bitcoin ecosystem was progressing well, but this particular Epic Satoshi did not reward players as expected, resulting in a failure...

This month's notable new projects include:

- Blob (Bitcoin Ordinals), a self-funded airdrop with an all-star lineup that even secured the Epic Satoshi initially. Just as everyone was looking forward to a new Bitcoin blue-chip to emerge in the art generation scene, it ended up being manipulated in a series of moves, ultimately collapsing. This may be one of the most disappointing Bitcoin NFT investments of the past year.

- Prometheans (Bitcoin Ordinals), the CyberKongz team's first foray into the Bitcoin ecosystem, started with a successful airdrop, but they faltered in the sale of their PFP series, and then left the Bitcoin ecosystem after abandoning the No.2 Rune DECENTRALIZED.

May: A Quiet Start to the Month

Starting this month, the NFT scene for 2024 is entering a relatively quiet phase.

For this month, coming off from the on-chain degen antics, there isn't much to report. The news mostly revolved around toys like Pudgy Penguins entering the stores of U.S. retail giant Target, DeGods making a comeback to Solana, and the like.

The standout performer for this month was Milady, showing an upward trend against the odds.

June: Quiet and Gloomy

This month, we witnessed CryptoPunks below 30 ETH. This marks the first time since August 2021 that the floor price of CryptoPunks has dropped below 30 ETH.

Furthermore, Three Arrows Capital auctioned off their full set of gold skin NFTs—BAYC + 2 MAYC + BAKC—that they had acquired spending approximately 140 ETH in both August 2021 and March 2022. This auction took place on June 18th at Sotheby's. During the peak of the NFT craze, the price of this asset set would likely have exceeded 1000 ETH. However, in June, the floor price of BAYC briefly dropped below 9 ETH.

It was indeed a dark moment for NFTs. Not until the last week of June did the longstanding Ethereum blue-chip NFT projects see a rebound. CryptoPunks rebounded by 24%, BAYC saw a rebound of up to 30%, Pudgy Penguins saw a rebound of up to 50%, Azuki saw a rebound of up to 35%. Solana's flagship Mad Lads also rose by 40%, while top Bitcoin projects NodeMonkes and Bitcoin Puppets both surged by over 20%.

In June, there was also an NFT project that gained popularity due to LayerZero's airdrop, and that was Kanpai Pandas. The market's dissatisfaction with the LayerZero airdrop spread to this project, raising suspicions of a "rug pull," which turned out not to be the case.

By the end of June, Abstract, the now-prominent "Penguin Chain," also made its first appearance in its current form. The predecessor of Abstract, Frame, as an NFT Layer2 chain, had been in silence since extending the pre-claim period for the airdrop on January 30th of this year. It wasn't until the end of June that Frame finally unveiled its trump card—the chain was acquired by Igloo, the parent company newly established by Pudgy Penguins. With this, the veil was lifted on all three brands in the Igloo ecosystem—Pudgy Penguins, the on-chain IP licensing platform Overpass, and Frame.

Frame underwent a rebranding. In addition to being renamed Abstract, the overall vision has also evolved from empowering creators and enhancing the NFT user experience to targeting mainstream consumers and driving widespread Crypto adoption.

Looking back, the sparks after the cold winter began to ignite at this time. In addition to Abstract, June also saw some standout new projects:

- Writ of Passage by The Beacon (Arbitrum), with a total supply of 10,000 and a minting price of 0.115 ETH, sold out in 7 minutes after entering the FCFS round. In the market conditions at that time, selling 10,000 NFTs at such a price was truly remarkable, mainly because it was essentially a presale of tokens.

- Gigabud (Solana), which had a public sale price of 1.25 SOL. As the official PFP of Grass WiFi, this series not only brought a significant amount of airdrops later on but also allowed holders to sell for over 1.25 SOL after the airdrop, which was very favorable.

Year-end: Direct Recovery to Hotness

The several months in the middle that were left blank were not due to my laziness but because there wasn't anything noteworthy to write about. A few things happened during these blank periods:

- Magic Eden confirmed its token launch, and finally, at the year-end, the $ME airdrop rewarded NFT collectors handsomely.

- Azuki confirmed its token launch.

- NFTs, as a means of bootstrapping many projects, gradually became popular starting from mid-year. At that time, what was trending were Free Mint projects with total supplies of 1,000 or even less, clearly stating future token airdrops. By the year's end, we witnessed the frenzy surrounding Kaito.

- On the Solana network, the rise of NFT series driven by meme coins blurred the line between memes and NFTs, with Retardio Cousins being the most iconic example.

- The Ape Chain simmered for a while, with some low-cost mint projects yielding high multiples, but there were no market-shocking cases in terms of earnings amount.

The year-end events left a deep impression on everyone, and the upcoming token launch of OpenSea is already on the horizon. Chains like Abstract, Monad, Berachain, and Story that have not yet launched their tokens saw a surge in interest due to potential token airdrops fueling related NFT projects (related reading: Which unreleased blockchain NFTs are worth paying attention to?). The wealth effect of the $PENGU airdrop propelled projects like Doodles, Azuki, and even Cool Cats to new heights. New standout projects began to emerge, such as Abstract's On-chain Heroes and Fukuhedrons on the Bitcoin network.

After a long absence, as spring returns to the earth, only one old blue-chip quietly exits the stage, and that is Clone X. This project with a Nike background announced on December 3 that it would cease operations, shocking all NFT players like announcing at a Lunar New Year's Eve dinner that one will no longer eat.

Looking ahead to the new year, Abstract's mainnet will launch in January, and Monad, Berachain, and Story may also present new opportunities. Let's hope everyone doesn't launch too close together, as overcrowding is not friendly to degens.

Building on Ethereum's steady blue-chip trend, although it seems unlikely for Ethereum to see another project that can rival the old blue-chips (considering the investment and resources that went into them, it's hard to imagine any new project receiving enough backing to catch up with what the blue-chips have achieved), a new narrative may bring new opportunities, such as AI-related NFTs.

More and more token projects may choose NFTs, a low-supply and easily controlled entry move, as a way to build momentum.

There is still room for growth in Bitcoin NFTs.

NFTs are no longer the NFTs we used to know. The content and IP narrative no longer align with the current version standards for screening new projects. "Issuance" and "Conspiracy" are now mainstream, but this does not prevent us from still discovering high-quality content that we like and appreciate. NFTs are still evolving.

Perhaps the concept of NFTs is already outdated, but the thing we love to play with has always remained the same—always just an image.

I finally conclude my remarks. Now, how would you rate the NFT market for the year 2024?

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群：https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群：https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号：https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia