How Can you Leverage On-Chain NFT Sales Data?
NFTs went from ultra-niche to mainstream in 2021, capturing an astounding amount of attention from brands, innovators, and traders. From access passes to free mints, there’s always a new craze in the NFT world, and these prevailing trends shift faster than nearly any other market.
With hundreds of new collections minting out and catching secondary volume every week, the average person can’t possibly keep track of them all on a daily basis.
In addition, different trends predominate across respective blockchain networks, adding complexity as an NFT trader, collector, or investor*.*
As such, asset management tools that aggregate and serve up multi-chain sales data in a digestible manner are in increasingly high demand. Most free tools provide extremely limited insights, given the costs of querying and indexing both on and off-chain data; on the other hand, most paid tools require a user to pay for multiple subscriptions, since their applications are specialized in either trading, discovery, or analytics.
Although the potential use cases for on-chain sales data are endless, we’ll be discussing the features that the majority of NFT traders and collectors expect from a pricing-focused application, such as an analytics tool or a portfolio tracker.
Trading tools
Traders, in particular, are constantly seeking the hottest and newest collections to buy into at low prices, or to flip before significant uptrend in prices. Consistent inflow of sales volume usually decreases the listing count for a given project. Using the law of supply & demand, if sales volume for an asset sustains and supply decreases, the price will naturally trend upwards.
Dashboards and wallet applications facilitate technical analysis of NFT sales. Applications display the top NFT collections by volume for a user-defined period. Sales volume and number of sales are primarily important to NFT traders, as collections pumps are often short-lived in the current market. For example, askNFTY’s NFT Search & Wiki application displays important collection-level statistics in a banner, including sales volume, served up in a digestible manner for any NFT enthusiast.
SimpleHash makes it easy for any developer to integrate these essential indicators using either our Sales & Transfers by Collection or our Sales & Transfers by Contract endpoint. Taking the latter for example, simply pass a specific chain and contract address, and get back a list of associated transfers with sales prices. You can specify the timeframe by passing the lower bound block number and the upper bound block number in the from_block and to_block query params. The volume of a trending collection can thus be calculated by summing its NFT sales prices over a given time.
Because the NFT market is largely community-based, prominent wallet addresses with proven success and large followings have gargantuan influence on a collection’s price and its trends. Smart Money refers to influential collectors in the space, while whale wallets refer to those with large NFT and crypto holdings. Gary Vaynerchuck, Pransky and J1mmy are a few influential figures in the space.
When following Smart Money & Whales, it’s helpful to see what they buy in a given collection. If Smart Money regularly seeks rare items for elevated prices, they’re probably showing interest in the long-term vision of the project, rather than short-term gains.
Using SimpleHash’s Sales & Transfers by Wallet(s) endpoint, one can track and analyze any wallet’s trading activities. Pass the interested chains and wallet addresses in the query params. An example response using J1mmy’s wallet address is shown below:
{
"next": "[<https://api.simplehash.com/api/v0/nfts/transfers/wallets?chains=ethereum&chains=ethereum&cursor=MTY1OTcyNTg1MDAwMDAxNTI4NDA4MDAwMDAwMDA1NDYwMDAwMDAwMDAwX19uZXh0&order_by=timestamp_desc&wallet_addresses=0xfa6e0addf68267b8b6ff2da55ce01a53fad6d8e2&wallet_addresses=vault.j1mmy.eth>](<https://api.simplehash.com/api/v0/nfts/transfers/wallets?chains=ethereum&chains=ethereum&cursor=MTY1OTcyNTg1MDAwMDAxNTI4NDA4MDAwMDAwMDA1NDYwMDAwMDAwMDAwX19uZXh0&order_by=timestamp_desc&wallet_addresses=0xfa6e0addf68267b8b6ff2da55ce01a53fad6d8e2&wallet_addresses=vault.j1mmy.eth>)",
"previous": null,
"transfers": [
{
"nft_id": "ethereum.0x892848074ddea461a15f337250da3ce55580ca85.2614",
"chain": "ethereum",
"contract_address": "0x892848074ddeA461A15f337250Da3ce55580CA85",
"token_id": "2614",
"from_address": "0xE0268949232a2fb9099F31fACA947c12ffb54f89",
"to_address": "0x8AD272Ac86c6C88683d9a60eb8ED57E6C304bB0C",
"quantity": 1,
"timestamp": "2022-08-11T02:19:56Z",
"block_number": 15318053,
"block_hash": "0xd97fc62362a03e743fd7803b890b311c81986b2d637217c95a11f74271432399",
"transaction": "0xfe374814de0ac358c899bf3d96697f82e49f00ca55f5eb43c0dee9589d03ba70",
"log_index": 735,
"batch_transfer_index": 0,
"sale_details": {
"marketplace_name": "OpenSea",
"is_bundle_sale": false,
"payment_token": {
"payment_token_id": "ethereum.native",
"name": "Ether",
"symbol": "ETH",
"address": null,
"decimals": 18
},
"unit_price": 1700000000000000000,
"total_price": 1700000000000000000
}
},...As you can see, the transaction shows the contract address of the sold NFT with a respective timestamp, while the sales price is shown in the unit_price field. Note that the sales price is listed in wei, where 1 ETH = 10¹⁸ wei. Thus, the NFT was sold for 1.7 ETH in the above example.
Wallet & marketplace use-cases
Both wallet and marketplace applications leverage sales data to enable portfolio tracking for their users. If a user wants to check their purchase prices or track their personal profits and losses, a wallet application can display the most recent sales data for a given NFT and the marketplace they occurred on using our Sales & Transfers by NFT endpoint. For example, askNFTY built a beautiful and user-friendly application with essential portfolio-tracking features, such as recent sales data on the NFT and wallet-level. Marketplaces can equally take advantage of this endpoint to get the full sales history of an NFT.
Collectors and traders always like to keep a pulse on how their portfolio is doing at any given moment; as such, wallets and specialized apps have implemented NFT appraisals to estimate a user’s portfolio, such as askNFTY’s NFT Portfolio tracker shown below. An application can use SimpleHash’s Sales & Transfers by Collection endpoint to look up the sales history for a range of tokens, and analyze the differences in sales prices based on specific traits and attributes.
With that information, the application can return an approximate valuation for a given NFT, and accordingly the estimate of an entire user’s portfolio returned through our NFTs by Wallet(s) endpoint . At SimpleHash, we offer dozens of ways to query NFT data in addition to the mentioned endpoints — you can read the API docs for an in-depth documentation with live example curl widgets of our endpoints, so you can them out yourself!
Before you start building, you’ll need to grab an API key here.
If you’re actively building a project leveraging on-chain sales data, shout us out on Twitter! It’s also the best way to stay up-to-date with new feature implementations and optimizations. Stay tuned to this blog for more explanations and deep dives into NFT data and infrastructure. Finally, if you have any questions about the API or how you can take advantage of our many endpoints, join our Telegram group.
