$2.7 Billion Spent on NFT Minting in 2022

It is not news at this point that NFTs can be expensive to purchase. If you want to buy a Bored Ape Yacht or CryptoPunks NFT, for example, you’ll be spending thousands if not millions of dollars. But besides buying an NFT outright, it is also expensive to mint them.

As we’ve seen with the Otherdeed NFT sale that saw people paying thousands in just minting fees, the NFT industry puts a lot of money into minting. Turns out, this amount collectively runs into billions of dollars, as per a new report from Nansen, an NFT and crypto insights company. 

Heavy Minting 

According to a report from Nansen which was published on August 2, 2022, NFT buyers have spent 963,227 ETH on minting NFTs in the first half of 2022 alone. This comes to about $2.7 billion and shows just how much money has been pumped into the industry. 

The data published by Nansen was based on information from January 1, 2022, to June 30, 2022, and revealed even more interesting NFT facts. For example, 50.7% of the ETH that was spent on minting remained with their initial projects while the remaining was circulated to wallets that were not related to these projects. This represented a decrease from 52.3% the year before to 45.7% now. 

So, what collections were these billions of dollars spent on? According to Nansen, Pixelmon- Generation 1 was the top collection with 24,159 ETH raised. Other collections in the top five were Moonbirds, VeeFriends Series 2, Genesis Box and World of Women Galaxy. 

Most of these mints took place on Opensea, though other platforms like 0x and Mints were represented in Nansen’s research. One of the factors that contributed to the first half of 2022 having such a high minting volume is the fact that many new NFT collections were launched, with February and May seeing the highest number of new collections. 

But the fact that many new collections were launched does not mean that all of them were raking in millions in minting fees. On the contrary, the Nansen report acknowledges that a majority of mints were concentrated among the top collections. 

“For the projects that have successfully raised ETH through their mint, almost two-thirds of these projects (65.8%, n= 9,229) raised below 5 ETH. The median amount raised by projects was 1.43 ETH, with the average being 59.4 ETH. A hundred and forty NFT collections have raised over 1,000 ETH. As such, the discrepancy between how much NFT collections raise through minting remains wide,” the report says. 

The Price of Minting 

While market conditions in the NFT space change all the time, this report shows that consumers are still spending on NFTs and that many new collections are constantly being launched. While not every project ends up a success a la Otherdeed, it shows that the space is still growing and that consumer demands are still being met.