The CoinGecko team has recently examined NFT or non-fungible token lending volumes which have reportedly surpassed $2.1B in Q1, led by Blend.
The CoinGecko has examined what they consider to be the top NFT lending platforms.
According to the research report, Blend is said to be “the top NFT lending platform, dominating the market with a 92.9% share, at a monthly lending volume of $562.33 million in March 2024.”
Blend launched in May 2023 “as the lending protocol offered by leading NFT marketplace Blur (BLUR), and immediately captured a majority 82.7% market share in the same month.”
The CoinGecko research report added that since then, Blend’s monthly market share “has remained in the lead, ranging from 88.8% to 96.5%. In Q1 2024, Blend saw its NFT lending volume jump 49.2% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to reach a new high of $2.02 billion.”
As stated in the update, the next most popular NFT lending platforms “are Arcade (ARCD) with 2.8% in market share from $16.94 million NFT lending volume, and NFTfi (NFTFI) with 2.2% from $13.32 million volume in March 2024.”
Arcade and NFTfi are said to be “the only other NFT lending platforms that have managed to consistently capture above 1.0% in monthly market share since last year.”
The report from CoinGecko also mentioned that Arcade “recorded a new quarterly high of $39.46 million in NFT lending volume in Q1 this year, which is a 37.1% increase QoQ. In the same period, NFTfi’s lending volume rose 48.3% QoQ to reach $35.88 million.”
With Arcade’s token launch in April 2024 and NFTfi’s upcoming token launch, it “remains to be seen what the impact will be on each platform’s NFT lending volumes.”
The remaining NFT lending platforms “are X2Y2 (X2Y2) and BendDAO (BEND), which both hold 0.8% market share, and Parallel Finance (formerly ParaX) with 0.5% market share.”
The report from CoinGecko added that the total NFT lending volume “reached a quarterly high of $2.13 billion last quarter, representing a growth of 43.6% QoQ as 5 of the 6 biggest NFT lending platforms experienced higher volumes.”
In particular, January 2024 saw “a record $0.90 billion in total monthly NFT lending volume, surpassing the previous high of $0.85 billion in June 2023.”
Given that NFT loan originations are “still dominated by Ethereum NFT collections due to the synergy between Blend and Blur, the impact of increasingly popular Bitcoin Ordinals on the NFT lending market may be worth looking out for.”
Methodology
The research study published by CoinGecko has “examined the top NFT lending platforms by monthly lending volume from January 2023 to March 2024, based on Dune Analytics data from @ahkek, @nftfi-team, @beetle and @arcade_xyz.”
