Weekly NFT sales drop 23% to $191 million amid crypto bear market. These were the 5 best-selling digital collections.

• NFTs have had a breakthrough year, and over the past 12 months, sales volume has hit $29 billion.
• But a significant decline in the cryptocurrency market has helped fuel a pullback in NFT sales.
• These were the five top-selling digital collectibles over the past week as NFT sales plunged 23%.

The cryptocurrency boom over the past few years has helped propel a newer market to record heights: digital collectibles known as NFTs.

The craze has pushed total NFT sales volume to $29 billion over the past year as artists, investors, and entrepreneurs descend upon the nascent Web3 space.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique, irreplaceable, mostly digital items that users buy and sell online.

NFTs use blockchain technology to keep a digital record of ownership, similar to cryptocurrencies. They were first launched on ethereum, the same blockchain that supports the cryptocurrency ether, and most NFTs can still only be purchased using ether.

A months-long sell-off in cryptocurrencies and the implosion of TerraUSD has taken a bite out of NFT sales more recently. Weekly NFT sales have declined by more than 80% from its early January peak of nearly $1 billion, according to data from NonFungible.com.

The past week alone has seen weekly NFT sales plunge 23% to $191 million from $255 million in the prior week, as familiar NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club was knocked out of its top spot by Meebits and newer entrants like Otherside.

These were the five best-selling collections over the past week, according to NonFungible.

5. CryptoPunks

7-Day Sales Volume: $9.1 million
Number of 7-Day Sales: 139
Highest Sale Price: $390,000

Explainer: "10,000 unique collectible characters with proof of ownership stored on the Ethereum blockchain. The project that inspired the modern CryptoArt movement."

4. Chimpers

7-Day Sales Volume: $16.0 million
Number of Sales: 7,411
Highest Sale Price: $117,000

Explainer: "Chimpers is a collection of 5,555 pixel chimps. Chimpers originated in The Boring Ape Chronicles. The Chimpers Genesis collection features unique, hand-drawn chimps — each a 1 of 1 artwork by the Chimpers artist, Timpers."

3. Bored Ape Yacht Club

7-Day Sales Volume: $23.9 million
Number of Sales: 437
Highest Sale Price: $580,000

Explainer: "BAYC is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs -- unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card, and grants access to members-only benefits."

2. Otherside

7-Day Sales Volume: $29.5 million
Number of Sales: 1,928
Highest Sale Price: $355,000

Explainer: "Otherside is a gamified, interoperable metaverse currently under development by Yuga Labs. Players will own the world, NFTs can become playable characters, and thousands will be able to play together in real time."

1. Meebits

7-Day Sales Volume: $38.6 million
Number of Sales: 316
Highest Sale Price: $250,000

Explainer: "From the creators of CryptoPunks, presenting Meebits. The next-gen 'OG', 3D voxel avatars ready for any metaverse applications. Building upon the success of CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs to supply provably scarce and fairly distributed 3D character avatars."