NFT sales reached $55.51 million in the seven days to Friday, up 57.17% on the previous week.
Transactions over the same period rose 5.93%.
Those two numbers describe very different weeks, and the gap between them is the story.
The Value Moved, the Trading Did Not
825,513 sales went through in the week, barely more than the week before. The money attached to them rose by more than half.
Work it through and the average sale price rose roughly 48%, to about $67. What the data shows is not a market trading more, it is a market trading dearer.
Ethereum accounts for most of that. Volume there reached $30.33 million, up 113.52%, which is 55% of all global NFT sales. Base rose 87.59% to $3.30 million. Polygon, Bitcoin and BNB Chain moved by 6.66%, 18.33% and 2.76% respectively, which is to say they barely moved at all.
Three Collections, a Third of the Market
CryptoPunks alone did $8.24 million of sales, just under 15% of everything traded worldwide.
Add Courtyard at $6.56 million and Credits at $5.18 million and the top three collections account for about $19.98 million, or 36% of the entire global NFT market for the week.
A market where three collections carry over a third of all activity is not broad. It is a handful of assets with genuine bids and a long tail with very little.
What the Surge Annualises To
At $55.51 million a week, the run rate works out at roughly $2.89 billion a year.
NFT trade volume for 2025 came in around $5.5 billion. So the strongest week the market has had in some time still annualises to a little over half of last year’s total.
That is the context missing from a 57% headline. The percentage is real and the base it is measured from is very low.
The Part That Is Genuinely Positive
Participation did grow, and not marginally. Buyer addresses rose 39.65% to 160,565 and seller addresses rose 39.19% to 150,410.
More people transacted while the number of transactions stayed flat, which means the average participant traded less often. That pattern fits new or occasional buyers making single purchases rather than traders cycling inventory.
Whether that holds is the thing worth watching. A market gaining participants is in better health than one gaining only prices, and a single week cannot tell you which of those is happening here.
Figures throughout are from CryptoSlam, captured on 26 September.
