According to the latest data from oklink, the total amount of Ethereum destroyed exceeded 500,000 ETH, with a destruction rate of 5.21 ETH/minute. The top three destroyed ETH protocols are OpenSea 74,200 ETH, Uniswap V2 27,100 ETH and ERC-20 USDT 23,700 ETH. OpenSea, the NFT trading platform, is far ahead in the on-chain application of Ethereum.

Among OpenSea's trading volume, CryptoPunk and Ape (BAYC plus MAYC) are again in the top two. More than half of the top 100 traded NFTs in OpenSea are avatar-based NFTs.

We believe that the avatar NFT has developed a good business model.

Trendy concept creation, famous artist design, limited purchase (mint), purchaser replacing as avatar, purchaser forming community, marketing (e.g. inviting celebrities to replace avatars), trading for profit, airdropping other avatars or accessories, using NFT for mining, demystifying, gaming, etc.

Avatar NFT has a different logic than traditional cryptocurrency projects. Traditional cryptocurrency projects are more like stock securities, while avatar NFT is like online fashion clothing + collectibles.

Back to its roots, avatars are essentially the "face" or "clothes" of the internet world. Its biggest problem is that it can be easily copied or plagiarized, but blockchain helps it to complete the authorization, so it becomes collectible, circulating and profitable.

To sum up, what kind of avatar-based NFTs are likely to succeed?

First, it needs well-known artists or IPs involved in making or initiating them, with beautiful designs and good concepts.The most important thing is: to make people willing to change this NFT into their avatars. Secondly, stars and big names is crucial. Both Punk and Ape have a large number stars participating, and the avatar is the most frequently appearing advertisement; thirdly, money-making effect, with investors participating in frequent transactions, from which there is room for profit, and some NFT investment communities have now formed.

Regarding the future of avatar-based NFT, it is too early to talk about the metaverse，social media is the main battleground for avatar-based NFT.That's why the NFT verification feature announced by Twitter is so critical.

"Twitter Spaces software engineer Mada Aflak publicly showed a quick demo of an outgoing video where users can click on their avatar, select an NFT from their crypto wallet, download that NFT from OpenSea (a popular digital collectibles marketplace) and then put that NFT image into their avatar, and then a "blue marker" will automatically be generated on their Twitter profile to indicate that they are the true owner of this NFT image."

In the future, if Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Telegram and other giant social software all add this feature one after another, and even Chinese social software such as Weibo, WeChat also add this feature (more likely using their own affiliate chains rather than public chains), then avatar-based NFTs could see a big explosion.

Of course, this is just a beautiful vision. The biggest difficulty facing avatar NFT is whether it will be too limited to a small circle.

The positive news is that major auction houses and traditional artists are very actively exploring this area. The negative news is that the vast majority of online users, are still not willing to pay for an avatar and are not aware of copyright. A controversial point is whether copyright is just in the Internet world and crypto world?