Cody McGrath 
The numbers behind the market’s initial bearish cycle are brought into sharp focus by Nansen’s NFT analysis.
The nonfungible tokens (NFTs) market dynamics and quantitative performance over the past three months are displayed in Nansen’s NFT Indexes Report for the second quarter of 2022.
The primary drivers of the well-documented NFT bear market are identified and quantified in the paper, including market capitalization, volume, and transactional indicators based on Ethereum, and others.
Beginning with an examination of weekly NFT volume statistics for Ethereum across a monthly span, the report discovered that June had the lowest value of the entire year.
Calculated across six exchanges, including OpenSea, LooksRare, Mints, X2Y2, 0x, and CryptoPunks, the NFT area saw a significant decline in June, at least economically, to close to 600,000 Ether (ETH) in trade per week.
In sharp contrast, the previous month of May had a weekly ETH volume of about 1.3 million, with almost 900,000 of those transactions taking place on OpenSea alone.
Despite this temporary deflation, there are signs of long-term optimism and assurances about the long-term demand for the area when examining the charts of first-time purchasers and returning monthly users.
Since the beginning of the year, the former has experienced notable fluctuations, going from 55,000 returning monthly users in February to 35,000 in May before increasing once more to almost 48,000 in June.
On the other hand, first-time purchases have stayed largely stable at the 5,000 user barrier since March of this year, demonstrating that the interest in NFTs on Ethereum as a means of speculation and enjoyment has maintained a small appeal.
The monthly user count, which is still at the 650,000 level despite a slight drop from last month’s 700,000, supports this long-term positive argument.
With the exception of Gaming NFTs at the end of Q2 2022, all indices across the board of the NFT space “saw a rebound in June (as measured in ETH),” according to the research.
The three NFT ETH indices that performed the best in June were Blue Chip-10, Social-100, and Metaverse-20, with the last index earning the most significant gains to surpass 1,000 on the index scoring system.
Observing this minor improvement in index performance during June, Nansen said, “NFTs’ trend reversal started earlier than the broad cryptocurrency market,” before noting that a “risk-off sentiment is still highly evident in the NFT market and the limited liquidity […] hints that this uptrend might not sustain.”