With the NFT market continuing to reach new lows, many have questioned the integrity of the market and if it can survive without hype as the prime motivator of consumer demand. 

Although the technology behind NFTs is fascinating, it’s clear that most collections ignore genuine adoption of NFT utility in exchange for poorly constructed artwork that holds depreciating value; but a mass exodus of buyers in the NFT market has already recognized this and left.

In their wake, the general sentiment is that NFTs are dead; however, there are still many projects that are successfully minting out and creating impactful trade volume on secondary markets.

The collection

Abstraction by Anon is the latest NFT collection to fully mint out and reach over 300 Eth in trading volume on secondary markets when the collection began its run in early December. Since then, the floor price of the collection has remained above 1 Ether and has a substantial amount of unique holders.

What makes the collection so interesting though is how experimental it appears to be. The tokens don’t offer any clear utilities and the project itself is shrouded in mystery as there is no website or information about the project available. Further, the artists themselves are only referred to as “Anon” which is short for anonymous, making the origins of this project unclear. 

However, the experimental aspects of the project are just how bold the collection is about its focus on artwork, lack of marketing or “utilities,” and a token-gated discord server that has nothing to offer to non-holders. 

Why its trending

With the current state of the NFT and crypto markets right now, the obvious question is: what’s the catalyst behind this collection? Although there is no specific answer to point to, it’s clear that Abstraction still checks off certain qualities that are necessary to create bullish signals for alpha callers. 

The first obvious reason for the project’s success is its artwork. While many collections tend to ignore the importance of high quality artwork with cheap degenerative knock-offs, Abstraction has original artwork that is reminiscent of the generative art genre. 

Secondly, the project has received a lot of hype and attention lately because of its mystery. NFT marketing runs on hype and rumors which plays directly into the appeal of a collection that offers no transparent information about its purpose other than being a simple art collection. 

Abstraction isn’t the only NFT collection with poorly detailed information about its purpose and features though, it’s just the latest to be genuine. A similar sentiment rang true for Goblintown when it first went live following the collapse of TerraLUNA.

NFT market is not dead

Overall, the success of this art collection shows that there is still notable activity occurring in the NFT ecosystem. Although the market has taken a significant loss this year, traders are showing that they are still highly interested in projects that evoke originality. 

Traders are also showing that they are becoming more selective with the projects that they interact with unlike collections from the Summer degen season when large amounts of useless tokens were being traded among the community.