Reddit NFT Avatars: NFT prices have witnessed an immense resurgence, thanks to the mass onboarding by community-led social media platform Reddit.
According to data from Dune Analytics, sales of the platform’s “NFTs” — which Reddit deliberately calls “digital collectible avatars” — just cracked US$2.5 million, a whiplash- inducing gain of 1112% from the day before.
The most popular of Reddit’s digital collectibles, built on the popular Polygon (MATIC) blockchain, have been going for upwards of 20 ETH, with the highest sale in the last 24 hours — a ‘Senses’ avatar — going for 30 ETH (US$40,000).
Indicative perhaps that positive price action is only just getting started, 19 of the highest 20 sales of all time have occurred in the last 24 hours. The Senses NFT collection is currently leading the hype, with more than 542 ETH (US$730,000) in total sales volume.
Screenshot of the Senses x Reddit NFT collection.
What’s behind the surge?
While it’s difficult to point to one specific reason for why Reddit avatars are experiencing a surge in value, it’s been confirmed that major NFT traders have been flooding into the Reddit ecosystem.
Prominent Bored Ape NFT trader 0xWave posted a screenshot on their Twitter account of their foray into the Reddit NFT market, showing off a collection of digital avatars from a host of the most popular collections including Foustlings and Senses.
Notorious Bored Ape flipper ‘Franklinisbored’ also made a stir in the r/avatartrading subreddit, getting himself banned from the server just 10 minutes after joining for his typical “bad behaviour”.
Last week, Reddit’s chief product officer Phil Bhat revealed that Reddit had seen nearly 3 million users on the platform create a ‘vault’ to house their NFT avatar. While the platform has been poked fun at for avoiding crypto-native terminology – such as replacing “wallet” with ‘vault’ and ‘NFT’ with “digital collectible” — the strategy seems to be working.
Now, some of the largest NFT-related accounts on Crypto Twitter are throwing some credit Reddit’s way for its “normie-friendly” approach.
Prominent Australian NFT personality ‘Jameson’ chimed in with his thoughts on Reddit’s process for onboarding users into the ecosystem as well.
Earlier this year, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman confirmed that the choice of words was a deliberate approach.
“We try really hard not to use any crypto words — it just confuses people,” he said. This is a fair point, with the jargon-heavy landscape of Web3 drawing frequent criticism from people unfamiliar with crypto speak.
Don’t get too excited about Reddit avatars
Despite the crazy price tags attached to some of Reddit avatars, Wab.eth, the pseudonymous founder of popular NFT project Sappy Seals told The Chainsaw that NFT traders would be wise not get too excited…
“The bull market isn’t coming back anytime soon. The Reddit avatars aren’t really surging as overall volume is still actually quite low,” they wrote.
“Most people are just holding because they got something for free,” Wab added.
Outside of the realm of pure NFT trading, Polygon’s MATIC token has witnessed a significant increase in volume and price following the influx of Reddit-related NFT trading. At the time of writing, MATIC has risen a little more than 14% since the Reddit NFTs began picking up steam on Sunday evening.
