OpenSea, one of the most widely recognized NFT markets in the cryptocurrency world, has slammed into a wall of absence. Namely, the absence of volume: the decentralized marketplace has seen a 99% drop on NFT trading volume in merely 90 days. From its high of $405.75 million on May 1, transactions on Non- Fungible Tokens have petered out to just $5 million throughout the entire month of August.

Reduced volume connects to reduced demand, which has in turn led to reducing floor prices (the lowest available price for a given NFT) for even the most recognized collections: the cheapest Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT can now be had for 72.5 ETH ($104,634 at time of writing). That's a 53% reduction in its ETH price (153.7 ETH) from May 1st. But the drop is even more massive when one takes into account the devaluation of Ethereum itself: On May 1st, the 153.7 ETH asking price for the NFT equaled $434,048 (price has thus tumbled by 76% on a dollar basis). CryptoPunks, another popular Ethereum-based NFT collection, has seen its floor price decline by a less drastic 20%.

Pricing for AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards has been evolving positively for the last seven months, experiencing a downtrend that has brought street prices closer to the actual MSRP on the best graphics cards. According to 3D Center's price analysis of the Austrian and German markets, GPU pricing for both AMD and NVIDIA's latest GPUs have reached historical lows - although these lows are still at a premium over MSRP. Anyone looking to buy an AMD graphics card is now looking at an average markup of 12% over MSRP, while NVIDIA cards seem to be holding their inflated values slightly better, and still stand at 119% of MSRP.

The price action comes on the back of months of increasing supply at retailers, alongside reduced demand from Ethereum miners due to falling ETH prices ($2,912.54 at time of writing) and the expectation for Ethereum's passage to Proof of Stake (PoS) through The Merge, which is still slated for later this year. It's also likely that most customers who still haven't bought into the latest generation of GPUs from either AMD or NVIDIA are waiting for the release of Intel's competing Arc Alchemist discrete GPUs, not to mention AMD's mid-year RX 6*50 refresh and NVIDIA's next-generation graphics solutions. An exploding ETH price might bring GPU prices back up again; but until then, and at the rate prices are seemingly (at least locally) falling, it seems that consumers might finally be able to purchase GPUs at MSRP sometime after May.

The deployment of PoS (Proof of Stake) in Ethereum - called The Merge - has been a target for the development teams for a while now - and yet it still hasn't see the light of day. However, we have been slowly clambering towards it, and the Ethereum team has issued a blog post that places that transition "in the coming months", which likely means a hard PoS fork closer to years' end. Of course, the timeline still gives miners some time make up for hardware investment costs, but perhaps some of them (the smallest ones at least) will start offloading their graphics cards soon so as to enjoy the higher, current second-hand pricing for the latest and greatest GPUs.

The implementation of PoS in Ethereum is expected to reduce power consumption by a ridiculous 95.95% - from a country-sized 44.49 TWh with the current PoW (Proof of Work) technology down to a comparably measly 2.62 megawatt estimate. The Merge should therefore aid Ethereum in not only becoming greener, but also increasing network security, reducing likelihood of 51% attacks, and allowing for further operational scaling of the network. The more skeptical of you will say that miners will just choose another profitable coin to mine, but we have to consider Ethereum's market cap and current valuation - there is currently no other coin that seems to be able to absorb the hashing power currently devoted to Ethereum without crashing its profitability for any and everyone involved. We might be looking at a relatively healthy second-hand graphics card market by the end of the year. Wouldn't that be nice?