Introduction

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital assets, NFT sales have become a critical metric for investors, creators, and market analysts. Understanding the flow of transactions not only at the individual token level but also across wallets, collections, and entire blockchains is essential for the management and evaluation of portfolios. This article delves into the methodologies and tools necessary to monitor NFT sales comprehensively, a skill set indispensable for anyone involved in the burgeoning sphere of digital assets. Whether you're developing a wallet, curating a portfolio, or integrating NFT data into accounting software, mastering these tracking techniques will provide you with the insights needed to navigate the NFT market with confidence.

‍

What is an NFT sale?

An NFT sale signifies the transfer of ownership of a digital asset, usually in exchange for cryptocurrency, most often on a secondary marketplace such as Blur or OpenSea. The event's metadata usually includes details such as the buyer, seller, and the sale price, amongst other fields.

NFT developers may want to track NFT sales at different levels of granularity. SimpleHash provides a set of tools making this easy, allowing developers to go from most to least granular. The sales of individual tokens can be tracked, or the sales of NFTs held in a specific wallet, or the sales of NFTs for a given collection, or even all sales on a particular chain, either summarized, or via a firehose stream.

There is a distinction between a transfer and a sale. A transfer is exactly that - the movement of an NFT token between one wallet to another, and may not involve a specific payment of tokens. A sale is a subset of a transfer - it almost always involves the exchange of actual cryptocurrency. SimpleHash allows you to query both types of events.

‍

How can I track the sales of an individual NFT?

At the token level, SimpleHash has several ways to get sales data.

• The NFT by Token List REST API endpoint allows for querying a specific set of NFTs at once. On each response, there is a `last_sale` field, which conveniently includes details on the most recent sale (if any) for that particular token.
• The Sales & Transfers by NFT REST API endpoint provides a full chronological history of all sales and transfers for a given individual NFT token

‍

How can I track the sales of the NFTs associated with a wallet?

For many applications (e.g., crypto wallets, portfolio trackers or accounting software), it's useful to be able to display the full sales history of the NFTs moving in and out of a given wallet.

• SimpleHash has a Sales & Transfers by Wallet(s) REST API endpoint to do this, for one or many wallets
• For push notifications, or other situations where timeliness is key, developers may also want to consider setting up a webhook to track the sales and transfers for a given wallet address

‍

How can I track NFT collection sales?

There are two types of approaches for tracking the sales of NFT collections. One is to look at the individual flow of sales, and the other is to look at more summarized stats of the volume and trends. SimpleHash makes it easy to do either

• SimpleHash has a Sales & Transfers by Collection REST API endpoint to track all individual sales on a collection
• A webhook event can also be used to track the individual sales and transfers for a given collection
• For more summarized collection stats, developers can consider the Collection Volumes & Market Caps REST API endpoint, which provides the overall sales volume and market caps of specific collections over different time periods (e.g., 1d, 7d, 30d), plus the percentage changes, along with conversions to USD, buyer and seller count, and more. This endpoint is particularly useful for building collection overview pages into an NFT-focused app.

‍

How can I track overall NFT sales volume at the chain or marketplace level?

At an even higher level, SimpleHash has a set of convenient endpoints for getting the overall market sales volumes.

• The Sales Volume by Chain(s) REST API endpoint provides a summary of trading volume, by chain and marketplace, for a given time interval. This is useful for getting a high level overview of NFT sales trends for different chains, or marketplaces. It comes with a wash trading filter built in, allowing developers to exclude trading that is likely fake.
  

‍

SimpleHash supports sale details from a wide variety of both mainnets and testnets, across all of the major marketplaces, the full list of which can be found here.

‍

What else is useful when considering NFT sales data for my app?

Many developers also want to build in "top" and "trending" sales functionality into their app. SimpleHash also has a set of endpoints to do exactly that:

• Top Collections (overall volume)
• Trending Collections (overall, based on the relative increase and uptick in activity across all collections)

‍

For customers with even larger or heavy-duty applications, SimpleHash also offers a full firehose stream of NFT sales data (i.e., all sales and transfers for a given chain) via our Bulk Service. This provides access to all historical and ongoing sales & transfer events for individual NFTs on the provisioned chain(s), while supporting high throughput and scalability. If a developer is interested in the sales of more than a few hundred collections or wallets, this is usually the more cost-effection option.

Have more questions about NFT sales? Feel free to reach out to us at hello@simplehash.com - we'd love to chat about your requirements and use-case.

‍