Nonfungible token (NFT) sales tapering off is nothing new, and since their May peak, they have gone down by about 90%. However, as some marketplaces shore up their numbers, NFT auction site Rarible appears to have users flocking away from its platform.

Rarible is one of the most popular sites for buying and selling digital collectibles, and in April, it reached $2.5 million in daily transactions, according to DappRadar. But as the overall cryptocurrency market entered a bearish spell, Rarible’s numbers took a nosedive and have not recovered yet. Data reveals how volumes declined to levels not seen since June 2020.

Rarible appears to have been left in the dust if to compare its performance with its main competitor, OpenSea. There has been a noticeable divergence in Rarible’s and OpenSea’s volumes in the last 12 months. As OpenSea’s daily transaction volume continues to press higher in July, breaching the $10-million mark several times, Rarible’s has been moving in the opposite direction.

Wash trading?

In July of last year, NFT data aggregator Nonfungible.com discontinued listing the market history of Rarible, claiming that the NFT marketplace’s move to enable users to earn RARI tokens, Rarible’s governance tokens, for buying assets fosters wash trading.

According to Nonfungible.com, allowing liquidity mining creates an artificial demand for the platform’s assets. As such, when users are incentivized to make purchases because they can get paid more than what they spend, it creates an illusion of demand for the assets. This is another form of wash trading, says the statement by the data aggregation platform.