NFT sales volume, by segment 2018-2020

The gaming segment reported the highest sales volume of the non-fungible token (NFT) market in 2020, with over six times the sales in sports projects. In that year, this segment accounted for roughly 23 percent of the total sales revenue in the NFT market. Meanwhile, even though the art segment sold only around 64.5 thousand units, it reported slightly higher sales revenues than the gaming sector. Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs are unique, non-transferable digital assets and can function as a blockchain-backed certificate of authenticity.

Number of transactions involving a non-fungible token (NFT) in gaming, art, sports and other segments from 2018 to 2020

Characteristic	2018	2019	2020
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-
-	-	-	-

Download

Source

Show detailed source information?

Already a member?

Sources

Use Ask Statista Research Service

Release date

March 2021

More information

Region

Worldwide

Survey time period

2020

Special properties

Source definitions of each segment can be found under the "Details" tab

Supplementary notes

The source specifies that: "10 NFT sold in a single bundle is considered 10 sales".

The source defines the segments as following:

Art: Marketplace, project or individual artist who produces, sells or generates content in the form of an NFT which is considered to be a work of art or relates directly to an art form whether manual or generative;
Collectibles: Project whose primary function is to issue tokens intended to be collected. These tokens can be part of a system that includes gamification or a set of interactions between collectibles themselves or between the collectors and players;
Gaming: Video game using the NFT standard. This can be Trading Card Games (TCG), strategy role-playing games (RPG) or any other fun-based gaming experience incorporating NFT;
Metaverses: Parallel digital universes which offer a set of unique experiences to users. These virtual worlds are accessible via a computer, virtual reality headset, or even a smartphone. They can be compared to the experiences offered by Virtual World Second Life and more recently to the film Ready Player One;
Sport: Sport projects are in the unusual position of being built around assets which feature personalities from the world of sport, most often in connection with the real-world players and teams such as Formula 1, football clubs, basketball teams and so on;
Utilities: Covering a wide variety of projects in which the NFT itself does not necessarily have a gaming or artistic function. Among other use cases utilities can be NFT domain names, tickets and assets that can grant access or specific rights to their owner.
Miscellaneous: This last project category includes all smart contracts that are tracked by NonFungible.com but have no record on the web, or ones where the creators are not known. This segment does not appear in the report as such, but is included in the overall volumes for the year.

Citation formats