A recent article published in The Wall Street Article has declared the NFT space is flatlining—just three days after the largest NFT drop in history.

• The Wall Street Journal has published a misleading article claiming that the NFT market is dying.
• The article cherry-picks examples of poorly-performing NFTs, highlighting the journalist’s lazy reporting.
• In the same article, claims of an imbalance between supply and demand in the NFT market completely miss the value proposition of non-fungible tokens.

Data compiled by The Wall Street Journal suggests that the NFT market is in decline. However, active participants in the NFT market know that this couldn’t be further from the truth.

WSJ Compiles Dubious NFT Data

Contrary to what The Wall Street Journal may say, the NFT market isn’t “collapsing.”

In a Tuesday article published by The Wall Street Journal, reporter Paul Vigna claims that NFTs are dying. The piece opens with two bold claims: daily NFT sales have fallen 92% from a peak of about 225,000 in September and the number of active wallets trading NFTs has also plummeted almost 90% from its November highs. The statistics paint a damning picture. But anyone who takes a closer look at where these figures came from and the methodology that produced them should realize that they don’t hold up under scrutiny, reported cryptobriefing.

According to Vigna, these statistics came from NonFungible.com, a self-described NFT Market data and analysis platform. Specifically, they appear to come from NonFungible’s NFT market Q1 2022 report published on Apr. 28. But that report relies on a limited scope of data.

It states that its data was pulled from transactions involving ERC-721 NFTs on Ethereum, NFTs on the Ronin chain used in the play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, and NFTs on the Flow blockchain. Given the high number of Ethereum NFTs that now use improved contracts such as ERC-1155 and ERC-721A, NonFungible’s sample skews toward older NFTs and excludes many newer collections. For example, Azuki, which is currently the sixth most-traded NFT collection of all time, is likely missing from the data as it uses an ERC-721A contract.

Additionally, the two Ethereum sidechains included in NonFungible’s report, Ronin and Flow, have both had an abysmal quarter. Ronin, which hosts NFTs for Axie Infinity, has seen its player base sharply decline as it grapples with rebalancing its in-game economy following a recent $550 million bridge hack. Flow has also seen its biggest NFT product, NBA Top Shot, fall from grace in recent months, with secondary market sales volume dropping over 80% since February 2021.

For some reason, NonFungible’s data also omits NFTs living on other blockchains such as Solana and Polygon. According to data from CryptoSlam, Solana has processed over 21,000 NFT transactions over the past 24 hours, making up $7.3 million in trading volume. Polygon, while smaller, also facilitates over $1 million worth of NFT trades daily. By excluding the second and third most active chains for NFT trading, NonFungible’s data does not accurately represent the whole sector. Claims that the data indicates a declining NFT market are therefore misleading at best.