The NFT market continues to maintain the growth recorded in 2024. In fact, a trading volume of $4 billion was recorded in Q2 2024, up 3.7% compared to Q1 2024. The blockchain sector performed poorly in terms of security. Despite the generally positive market outlook in fact, there was a loss of $430 million due to exploits and hacks. This is an increase of 5% compared to last quarter.
4 billion trade volume
According to data reported by DappRadar, the second quarter of 2024 saw NFT trading volume of $4bn, up 3.7% from the previous quarter, which stood at $3.9bn. In addition, the market recorded 14.9 million NFTs sold, up 28% from the previous quarter. The second quarter of 2024 was the best-performing quarter since the first quarter of 2023, outperforming, albeit slightly.
Blur continues to be the leading force in the NFT market with a 31% market share, although this represents a 50% drop from last quarter’s performance. In second place is still Magic Eden, which achieved incredible success with BTC Ordinals and increased its dominance from 17% to 22%. OpenSea ranks third in terms of trading volume and dominance, but is the most dominant NFT market in terms of sales with a 12% market share.
The top 5 NFT collections by trading volume this quarter remain largely unchanged from the previous quarter, with the notable exceptions of Runestone and fantasy.top. Both of these collections enjoyed incredible success and popularity in Q2 2024.
430 million dollars lost due to exploits and hacks
Exploits and cyber attacks in the Web3 sector continue to be a significant concern, unfortunately. In fact, in the second quarter of 2024, the industry reported $430 million in losses due to security breaches, a 5% increase from last quarter. Ethereum and BNB Chain were the most affected blockchains, each responsible for about 28% of the total incidents. Solana was involved in around 8% of the incidents, while the remaining 36% occurred in other blockchains, including Polygon and Arbitrum. Although access control problems accounted for only 23% of the incidents, they caused a substantial 75% loss of total funds, highlighting the serious financial impact. This figure emphasises that although access control problems are less frequent, they are significantly more financially damaging.
In the second quarter of 2024, there were five major security incidents in particular. The first is a hacker attack on DMM Bitcoin, a centralised cryptocurrency exchange based in Japan. On 31 May, it lost USD 305 million in the largest blockchain theft since December 2022. On 20 May, Gala Games was involved: a hacker exploited an access control vulnerability in the GALA token contract, minting 5 billion GALA tokens and selling 592 million of them for $21.8 million in ETH, causing prices to drop by 20%. On 4 June, however, it was the turn of Lykke, a centralised cryptocurrency exchange based in Switzerland, which suspended withdrawals after losing over USD 22 million in a security breach. On 14 May, on the other hand, Sonne Finance on Optimism was exploited via a known Compound v2 fork attack, resulting in a loss of $20 million. Finally, on 13 June, Holograph, an NFT protocol, suffered a $14.4 million hacker attack when a former developer exploited a smart contract vulnerability to coin 1 billion HLG tokens. These incidents show how important it is to keep exchange platforms safe and to be careful when using blockchain. One must always be careful and improve security when using blockchain technology. For more information on these security issues and others, check the REKT database.
