Conclusion

• The total trading volume for Art Blocks has risen from $1.8M in May to $580M in August. Trading on Opensea seems to be responsible for the gigantic volume increase of the project. The volume share of the platform has been increasing since May. In August it was responsible for around 85% of the entire USD volume.
• Curated collection sales have grown tremendously and provided around 63% of the whole volume in August. However, the Factory and Playground collections increased their combined share of the volume from 27% in May to 37% in August
• The average price increased to $12k from 450$ in the last 7 weeks. Furthermore, there are a lot more weekly sales from June onwards compared to the previous months.
• More than half of the NFT's were minted after June 23!
• The main minter influx seems to start in the last week of June and peak around the beginning of August. Also in the last week of August.
• HODLers took advantage of the recent craze to cash out.

Looks like the HODLers took advantage of the recent craze to cash out.

• On June 22, almost 4 out of 10 NFT's was owned by their original minters (HODLers)
• This ratio took a nose dive to around 2% as the HODLers cashed out following the exponential increase in prices.

Next up we are going to see if HODLers are still holding or if they have cashed out. What do I mean by a HODLer?

• If a minter did not sell the minted NFT, I am going to count that NFT as being HODLed until it gets sold.
• I am going to call the ratio of NFT's being HODLed over the total number of NFT's minted as the HODL ratio.

• March 17 seems to be the only big day in the previous months. There were 887 collectors minting for the first time. All of the first time minters on March 17 minted an NFT from the Apparitions collection.
• The main minter influx seems to start in the last week of June and peak around the beginning of August.
• The number of unique minters more than doubled during this period, rising from close to 6k to more than 12k. Around 16% of these new minters minted their first Art Blocks NFT on August 2!

• The slope of the graph increases after Jun 23 meaning that more NFT's are being minted each day compared to before.
• More than half of the NFT's were minted after this date!
• We can see from the "Weekly Number of Sales and the Average Sale Price" graph in the previous section that this week was when the number of sales started to take off. More than double the amount of sales were recorded compared to the previous week.

In this section I am going to take a look at how many Art Block NFT's have been minted cumulatively and try to find the new collector influxes by taking a look at the growth in the number of unique minters over time. Also, we are going to see if any projects were able to draw in collectors after launching.

• The exponential price growth is unbelievable. The average price of an NFT from the Fidenza collection grows to $608k from $40k in just 7 weeks. The ROI is just a silly number at this point.

Moving on from the sale volume, I am going the take a look the minting events to try and understand when the hype really started to take off.

• Geometry Runners was released on the 27th of August and had a whopping $39M of sale volume in last week.
• The top 3 collections combined achieved around $90M. These collections are on fire 🔥 🔥

Let's see how the average prices changed for the collections in the top 10 by sale volume in each week

• Looks like the Art Block NFT's are going to the moon! The average price increased to $12k from 450$ in the last 7 weeks. Also, there are a lot more weekly sales from June onwards compared to the period before. With the weekly sale count peaking at a staggering 25k both on the last week of July and August.

Let's look at the top 10 collections by sale volume in each week.

Now let's breakdown the volume to number of sales and the average sale price and increase the granularity to weeks instead of months.

• The Curated collections seem to be the fan favorite.
• Even though the USD volume of the Curated collection sales have grown tremendously and provided around 63% of the whole volume in August, the other categories increased their share of the volume from 27% in May to 37% in August

• The Art Block craze seems to have hit a huge peak. The total trading volume has risen from $1.8M in May to $560M in August. Which is actually crazy!
• Trading on Opensea seems to be responsible for the gigantic volume increase of the project. The volume share of the platform has been increasing since May. In August it was responsible for around 85% of the entire USD volume.

To understand just how much this project has grown in such a little time, we are going to start with the USD volume of sales. First I'm going to breakdown the volume by platform the sale was made on and then the curation status of the collection the NFT is part of. Let's see if there are any favorites for the collectors.

• There are some discrepancies between graphs because the metadata table has some duplicates/missing tokens

Introduction

What is the Art Blocks project? (ELI5 on the project website)

• Art Blocks is a first of its kind platform focused on genuinely programmable on demand generative content that is stored immutably on the Ethereum Blockchain.

• You pick a style that you like, pay for the work, and a randomly generated version of the content is created by an algorithm and sent to your Ethereum account.

• The resulting piece might be a static image, 3D model, or an interactive experience.

• Each output is different and there are endless possibilities for the types of content that can be created on the platform.

Why should you care?

• The demand for these generated NFT's has recently skyrocketed. Spoiler alert, the sales had around $350M volume in August, which is more than 3x the combined volumes of every month before! There were individual NFT sales snatching more than $3M!

How do you actually get a hold of one?

Minting (You can also skip this step to buy already minted ones)

• Once you find a collection which you like the style of, you can mint a unique iteration of it for your self. The NFT is generated on demand which means you will not know what the specific one you are getting will look like.

• However, do note that each collection has a maximum iteration limit which means that no one will be able to mint a new piece anymore after it reaches that limit.

• After you pay for the NFT and the transaction gets confirmed, you will get your unique generative content as an ERC721 compatible NFT token.

What are your options?

Curated Collections: If an artist wants to launch their project as a Curated collection the project needs to be subjected to a vetting process.

• The artist submits the project and generates samples for the curation board.

• The samples need to be approved by the curation board for the project to become part of curated pieces.

Playground:

• The playground is where the artist who have released a Curated project come to have some fun and experiment. Well, after all it is the Playground.

Factory:

• Factory is for the artists who do not want to follow or wait for the Curation process and just want their projects out there.

Now that you know the basics, let's begin our analysis.

HODLers

Mints

Sale Volume