NFT Market Trading Users Plunge 90%: NFTs Aren’t Dead, But Sentiment Is in “Deep Freeze”
If you only look at cryptocurrency price charts, you might think the 2025 market is booming — Ethereum has surged 19% in the past 7 days, climbing to $4,100; global crypto market cap is approaching $4 trillion, up even from last week. But if you shift your gaze to NFTs, the picture suddenly turns icy.
Just a few months ago, we were still talking about the NFT market’s recovery. Unfortunately, the good times didn’t last. According to market data, over the past 7 days, global NFT sales volume fell 11% to $134.9 million — but the real shock isn’t the drop in sales, it’s the cliff-like collapse in the number of buyers and sellers, both down by around 90%. Specifically, buyers plunged 89.83% to 73,900, while sellers dropped 91.14% to 42,878.
Even more surreal, at the same time NFT participation collapsed, CryptoPunks still pulled off a single $2.5 million sale.
In one sentence: the current NFT market sees top-tier assets occasionally making headlines, but the broader market temperature is falling at breakneck speed.
The Story Behind the Data: Who’s Leaving?
From the data perspective, this NFT downturn has hit almost every major chain:
Ethereum remains the leader with $58.5M in sales, but that’s down 23.43% week-over-week, with wash trading down 61.64%.
Polygon bucked the trend in sales volume, up 56.9% to $17.8M, ranking second, but its buyer count still plunged over 97%.
Bitcoin NFTs (Ordinals-related) posted $14.2M in sales, down 19.47%.
BNB Chain sales rose 33.54% to $13.6M, but buyers fell 95%.
Solana sales came in at $8.2M, down 33.49%.
Note: some fluctuation ranges are within normal thresholds.
In other words, this isn’t a problem with a specific chain or platform — active NFT users are retreating across the board. Even on chains where sales went up, it’s largely due to a few big transactions holding up the numbers despite a massive collapse in user count.
Why NFTs Are Diverging Sharply From Mainstream Coin Prices
Many people instinctively assume: if coin prices rise, NFTs should also heat up. After all, NFTs are often priced in ETH, SOL, MATIC, and other major tokens — if those coins rise in value, their USD prices should, in theory, increase too. But reality often goes the other way. This time, ETH surged 19% over the past 7 days, yet the NFT market tanked, with buyers and sellers both down 90%. This isn’t surprising — there are several reasons why.
Rising coin prices make “holders” reluctant to sell
NFTs are priced in crypto. If ETH spikes, NFT holders may think: “Instead of selling my NFT for ETH that’s now more valuable, I might as well just hold the coin.” This reduces supply on the market and trading activity — fewer sell orders mean fewer successful trades.
Strong rallies in coins drain liquidity from NFTs
When top assets like ETH and BTC enter strong bullish trends, investors prefer to put funds directly into the coins themselves rather than into NFTs, which are relatively niche, more volatile, and less liquid. In other words, most people want to “ride the main wave first, then think about derivatives,” pushing NFTs to the sidelines.
Mainstream capital flows have shifted
Speculative capital that poured into NFTs in 2021–2022 is now chasing major coins, DeFi blue chips, or the latest meme coin opportunities. The “narrative heat” around NFTs has cooled significantly.
NFTs are “speculation + culture,” not purely financial assets
NFT prices are driven more by community hype, project team activity, and IP storytelling than by pure market forces. ETH’s rise is a network-wide consensus; NFT consensus requires stronger community stickiness and story-driven momentum. That’s why even with a $2.5M CryptoPunks sale, the broader market still fell — a single blockbuster can’t lift the whole market.
Psychological misalignment
When coin prices surge, many buyers hold back, thinking it’s not worth buying NFTs priced in expensive ETH; at the same time, sellers raise their expectations, widening the bid–ask gap and stalling trades.
NFT investment hurdles are higher than expected
In the early bull run, buying NFTs wasn’t just investing — it was a status symbol. But as the market cools, the risks of poor liquidity and difficulty reselling in secondary markets are magnified, dampening new user interest.
Macro sentiment and narrative cycles are out of sync
Crypto’s hot spots rotate. When attention and capital focus on Layer 2, AI narratives, ETF developments, etc., NFTs become the “quiet corner.” This time ETH’s rally was fueled mainly by futures premiums and institutional buying, not NFT market excitement — hence the divergence.
Bottom line: NFT and coin prices aren’t simply positively correlated. They have separate drivers. Rising coin prices might boost NFT price tags in USD terms, but won’t necessarily increase market activity — and often, when capital is chasing main coin rallies, NFTs lag behind.
CryptoPunks Selling Doesn’t Mean the Market Is Healthy
The most eye-catching headline in this downturn was CryptoPunks #1021 selling for 720 ETH (about $2.56M). But such high-ticket sales from top-tier projects don’t reflect the health of the overall NFT market. The reasons are clear:
Top project dominance rises: With buyer counts collapsing, top NFTs attract more focus as perceived “stores of value.”
Whale-driven market: Big-ticket trades are dominated by a tiny group of deep-pocketed players, with limited impact on overall liquidity.
Weakened herd effect: New users are scared off by sky-high prices, cheap NFTs lack buyers, and liquidity at the bottom dries up.
Simply put — a CryptoPunk selling is like a luxury item going at auction; it doesn’t mean regular shops have customers.
Three Possible Paths for NFTs
Looking at this 90% crash, the NFT market could head in several directions:
Assetization & Financialization: Integrating NFTs into on-chain finance — collateralized lending, NFT index funds, etc.
Scenario-based use cases: Moving from profile pictures to utility-based assets like in-game items, ticketing, and on-chain identity.
Brand-driven operations: Following models like Pudgy Penguins, using offline licensing and IP expansion to keep the brand hot — making NFTs more than JPEGs by plugging them into real-world consumer chains.
Conclusion: Don’t Be Spooked by Short-Term Collapse, But Don’t Ignore the Signal
A 90% NFT crash doesn’t mean the sector is dead. Just like Bitcoin survived the 2018 crypto winter while bubble projects were flushed out, this sharp drop may be the start of a new reshuffling.
From a third-party perspective, this looks more like a “risk rebalancing” — capital moving back to higher-certainty sectors, forcing NFTs to find more sustainable, long-term survival models.
The next NFT boom might not be about profile pictures at all, but about an on-chain asset form that truly solves a real-world problem. When that happens, today’s data will be remembered as a necessary reboot.
