When it comes to NFT, everyone's attention is undoubtedly focused on ETH first, followed by Solana. Bitcoin NFT, which just emerged this year, also has a high level of discussion. Even Layer2's Arbitrum has been highly anticipated by NFT players due to the popularity of Beacon and Magic ecosystems.

Compared to that, the discussion of Polygon's NFT market is much lower and seems to be quiet. Yesterday, the NFT series y00ts under DeGods announced that it would migrate from Polygon to the ETH mainnet and return the $3 million funding support given by Polygon. This seems to indicate that the Polygon NFT market is sluggish.

Actually, the total trading volume of the Polygon NFT market ranks fifth among all blockchain networks. If we exclude "Axie game chains" like Ronin and "NFT specialized chains" like Flow, Polygon is second only to ETH and Solana.

In the past 30 days, the total transaction volume of the Polygon NFT market ranked third, with a very small gap compared to the total transaction volume of Solana. Considering that the total transaction volume of Bitcoin NFT includes a lot of BRC-20 Token transaction volume, Polygon can be said to be at the level of "stable 3 and grab 2".

Polygon NFT market, will it replicate the boom of Solana NFT market in its early days? What are the projects worth paying attention to in the current Polygon NFT market?

Solana's Another "NFT Sinking Market"?

At that time, the ETH NFT market and even the entire crypto market were in a downward trend, but the Solana NFT market was rising against the trend. Most importantly, "going viral" gave Solana NFT "attention", which made everyone believe that they could make money by looking for potential new "blue chips" or targeting "non-blue chip" opportunities that could increase liquidity in the short term. Low transaction fees and cheap prices for new projects have made Solana NFT a potential "lottery ticket" with better potential returns - after all, it's hard to catch the next CryptoPunks or BAYC on ETH, and these projects are too expensive for newcomers. And the new projects are not cheap either, and the ceiling for price increases can be seen, like a gold mine that has already been mined almost completely.

Now let's take a look at the Polygon NFT market.

On the B-side, there are many Web2 giants entering the Polygon NFT market.

Starbucks Rewards, a loyalty reward mechanism of Starbucks, has expanded to "Starbucks Odyssey" built on Polygon. Currently, the total market value on the platform exceeds 9 million US dollars, with a secondary market trading volume of over 2.5 million US dollars. More than 210,000 "Journey Stamps" NFTs have been minted so far.

Starbucks Odyssey

Nike's NFT platform, .SWOOSH, is built on Polygon. The first digital sneaker collection, "Our Force 1," sold over 97,000 units and generated over $1.9 million in sales. In June of this year, Nike Virtual Studios announced a partnership with video game giant EA Sports to bring Polygon NFTs and digital content from Nike's .SWOOSH platform into EA's gaming ecosystem.

「Our Force 1」

Reddit's Collectible Avatar has released its 4th generation on the Polygon network, with a total market value of over $50 million and sales exceeding $40 million. It has nearly 16 million holders, making it the NFT series with the largest number of holders worldwide.

Reddit「Collectible Avatar」

The performance of game NFTs on Polygon is also quite impressive. Looking at the on-chain data, the top two projects in terms of historical transaction volume for Polygon NFTs are both game-related NFTs.

The number one ranked ZED RUN is a horse racing game where players can borrow or purchase their own horses for training and competing against other players' horses. According to the project's official website, its brand sponsors include Budweiser, Atari, and Netflix. According to Cryptoslam data, the project's total trading volume exceeds $200 million.

ZED RUN

Ranked second, DraftKings had a trading volume of $6.7 million in the past 7 days, accounting for about 35% of the total historical trading volume. The recent rapid growth in trading volume has led to DraftKings being described as the "NBA Top Shot on Polygon". DraftKings Marketplace is an NFT market built by DraftKings (NASDAQ stock code: DKNG) for the "masses", selling assets such as star cards, Reignmakers football, golf and UFC management games, as well as some virtual and real combined products.

DraftKings Marketplace

@0xobsessed classified game projects on Polygon, covering over 150 games built on Polygon. There are quite a lot of games.

It can be said that the Polygon NFT market is a "not what we imagine as Web3" NFT market. In terms of "mass-oriented" products and game products, Polygon has gone further than ETH and Solana. The common characteristics are a closed market, providing users with custodial wallets, and supporting/only supporting fiat currency payments. At this stage, these B-side achievements have not been able to effectively convert Web2 users to Web3 to help Polygon establish its own Web3 NFT community and culture like Solana.

On the C-end, the Polygon NFT market has not yet seen a situation where an NFT project ignites the entire ecosystem like Solana before it appeared. Although there are "branch lines" of first-line PFP projects on ETH such as CyberKongz VX, mature metaverse land migrated from The Sandbox, and utility-type NFT projects with a strong meme flavor that have attracted high attention, such as the first NFT series of former US President Donald Trump, "Trump Digital Trading Cards", there has never been an "outstanding star" in the PFP category. Due to y00ts' departure, the throne of PFP projects on Polygon NFT has also appeared vacant, and there is reason to expect that this vacuum will be filled in the future, and the "season of Polygon NFT" will appear.

Although there is reason to expect the emergence of the "Polygon NFT season", it is also undeniable that the present is different from the past. Firstly, the overall situation of the Crypto market is more bearish than when the "Solana NFT summer" appeared, and secondly, the interest and trust of NFT players in PFP narratives has almost been worn away. To see the emergence of the "Polygon NFT season", we may first need to expect an overall warming of the Crypto market, with sufficient liquidity to support the wealth effect of Polygon NFTs.

值得关注的 Polygon NFT 项目

Worth noting Polygon NFT project

PFP

After y00ts' departure, the most noteworthy Polygon PFP project is undoubtedly Pluto Misfits.

Pluto Misfits

Pluto Misfits is a project highly recommended by Polygon, with Polygon Ventures leading the investment and Polygon co-founders Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani providing angel investment. The specific amount of the investment has not been disclosed, but the valuation is estimated to be $15 million.

Sandeep Nailwal not only invested, but also personally went out and swept 100 Pluto Misfits. On Twitter, many members of the Polygon team have also changed their avatars to Pluto Misfits, such as CEO @0xMarcB, investment director @shreyansh_27, growth director (NFT, DeFi, DAO, Tokenization) @sourcex44, BD director (NFT) @glabuz, senior assistant @rainyreece_ and @Smokey_titan, and social media staff @itsNikkiLOL, etc.

Pluto Misfits 开图后，Polygon Ventures 官推亲自发文祝贺

After the opening of Pluto Misfits, Polygon Ventures personally congratulated them on their official Twitter account.

Pluto Misfits is the first project incubated by Magic Batch, which is also supported by Polygon Ventures. Members of Magic Batch include Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani, co-founders of Polygon, and co-founders of Pluto Misfits @dostmalonee (who previously established Asia's largest creator incubator Nofiltr, which has partnered with over 700 brands including Netflix, Uber, and NBA, reaching over 150 million users) and @rjun_eth, Pluto Misfits product manager @rashdriving_, early Polygon investor @RahulDLM, and core team member of Memeland @0xChar. Magic Batch refers to Pluto Misfits as the "Polygon NFT flagship".

Pluto Misfits has a total of 4444 units, with a sale price of 99 Matic. Currently, the floor price has reached 288 Matic. It is worth mentioning that Pluto Misfits has remained stable and even increased in value after its release.

Pluto Misfits Price Trend

Game

What I am most looking forward to is MapleStory N, the blockchain version of the classic 2D online game "MapleStory" built on Polygon Supernet. BlockBeats previously published an article detailing MapleStory N. (Recommended reading: "MapleStory+NFT": Why did the classic game with over 180 million registered players choose to go on-chain?)

Another game worth paying attention to is Mojo Melee. This is an auto battler game that has landed on Amazon Prime Game and will distribute Gwyn Rockhopper NFTs and 850 ORE (in-game currency, not on-chain assets) to Amazon Prime users. Mystic Moose, the team behind Mojo Melee, completed a $5 million seed round of financing in December 2021, with Animoca Brands leading the investment and participation from Courtside Ventures, Republic Crypto, Alameda, AU21, Sfermion, Polygon Studios, Collab+Currency, Sky Vision Capital, Spartan Capital, HyperEdge, Momentum6, and Fourth Revolution Capital.

Mojo Melee

Utility

FireDrops is a brand loyalty reward platform where users can complete loyalty tasks given by their favorite brands, such as social media engagement, product purchases, user referrals, and other brand-related tasks. By completing loyalty tasks, users can earn rewards such as cash discounts, free products, priority access, and NFTs. Users can also trade these rewards on the platform's built-in marketplace in the future.

This sounds like a Web2.5 loyalty reward product similar to Starbucks' "Starbucks Odyssey", but with a much wider coverage. Currently, you can apply to join the waiting list on the FireDrops website. According to official sources, over 1 million users have already applied.

FireDrops by Flipkart

NFT Trading Market

Under OpenSea, the second largest NFT trading market on Polygon is currently dew. Similar to Blur, dew is both an NFT aggregator and an NFT market, but it cannot be compared to Blur in terms of comprehensive functionality and is still waiting for improvement. Even so, the user experience of dew is currently very good.

dew interface

As we can see, dew has firmly occupied the second seat in the Polygon NFT trading market.

According to official sources from dew, the company has received investments from institutions such as Polygon Labs and Circle. The specific amount of funding is unknown. Currently, dew's first round of token airdrops has ended and the second round is about to begin. The details of the activity have not yet been disclosed.

Conclusion

Currently, Polygon NFT has shown outstanding performance in the development of Web2 giants' entry and game ecology. In addition to the announcement of Polygon 2.0 ($POL) earlier, some NFT players have a high level of optimism about the development of the Polygon NFT market. They have even proposed the "Polygon NFT Q4 Moon Landing Theory" based on these factors:

However, we need to clarify two points. First, "landing on the moon" here refers to the development of a solid community (player group) and a distinctive player culture for Polygon NFTs, similar to ETH and Solana, and more directly reflected in the "blue chip" PFP type NFTs familiar to crypto players, which can attract a large number of Web3 native NFT players to enter the gold rush. Second, what Web3 native NFT players need most at this stage is the "wealth effect", and the large number of Web2 users accumulated by Polygon NFTs still cannot see a good channel to attract them into the Web3 world in a short time. The markets of giants such as Starbucks and Nike are like "independent kingdoms" in the Polygon NFT market, and Web2 users are still blocked by their closed markets. Whether they can successfully import increments to Web3 users in the future remains to be seen.

The new market is always full of opportunities. There has not yet been a true "blue chip" native to Polygon, which gives us plenty of room for imagination. Polygon seems to be like Solana at the time, ready for everything, only lacking a "East Wind" like Okay Bears. Will we see the emergence of "Polygon NFT Season"?

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