Original author: Patti, ChainCatcher
Original editor: TB, ChainCatcher
A force coming from the East is creating a wave of NFT.
This Thursday night, Moriusa (すとぷり) NFT was launched on Opensea with an offering price of 0.05 ETH. The market was extremely hot, and its floor price once soared to 0.44 ETH.
While Chinese users were still confused, Moriusa had already been flooded with comments in Japanese and English regions, and even managed to raise the gas fee on the ETH chain on its own.
The Moriusa NFT image was born from the popular Japanese IP - Strawberryprince, a virtual idol group under STPR. It is a peripheral derivative product of the virtual idol group, and Mofees is a collection of Moriusas, each of which has its own unique emotions and dress.
The relevant YouTube page shows that the current number of subscribers to the strawberryprince channel has reached 3.63 million. This time, a large number of purchases also came from its offline IP audiences, concentrated in Japan, Europe and the United States.
Yellen, an NFT player in the Chinese region, revealed that the Chinese community hardly participated in the cooperation with Moriusa this time, but Moriusa NFT was extremely popular in Japan and the English region.
In fact, this is not the first time that NFT and Japanese anime culture have collided. As a global industry, anime culture has a perennial topic of industrial derivatives. Using the currently popular NFT format to link offline fans with online communities has become a breakthrough for many cultural IPs to create economic value, including One Piece, Bleach, Attack on Titan and many IPs of Hayao Miyazakis Studio Ghibli have derived their own IP products, but since most of them are released on Japanese local platforms, such as LINE NFT, Fantop, etc., they are relatively unfamiliar to Chinese users, and their scope of influence and economic effects are also limited.
Moriusa NFT has taken advantage of this pain point. As early as January this year, STPR announced to fans that it would launch an overseas development project and chose to publish it on the overseas platform Opensea. It can use the enthusiasm of local Japanese fans to drive the popularity of NFT on the chain, thereby attracting the attention of overseas markets to this local IP.
Moriusa breaks out of the circle and ignites OpenSea. Can NFT recovery return to its peak?
Currently, the overall activity of the NFT market continues to be sluggish, and leading NFT trading platforms including OpenSea and Magic Eden are facing severe challenges. According to CryptoSlam data, global NFT sales in the first quarter of 2025 were only US$1.5 billion, a 61% decrease from US$4.1 billion in the same period of 2024.
In August 2024, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a Wells Notice to OpenSea, accusing some NFTs on its platform of potentially constituting unregistered securities and threatening to file a lawsuit. This news is like adding insult to injury, accelerating the cooling of the already weak NFT market. Data shows that OpenSeas share of the Ethereum NFT market has fallen from 97% at the beginning of 2022 to around 20% at the end of 2024, and the platforms position is precarious.
The turning point began at the beginning of this year, when OpenSea launched the public beta version of its new generation platform OS 2. At the same time, the SEC announced the suspension of its investigation into OpenSea, and the temporary relief of regulatory pressure gave the platform some breathing space. With these two positive factors, OpenSea quickly regained its momentum and regained its dominance in the NFT trading market.
According to the latest data from NFTScan, OpenSea platform transaction volume has topped the list in the past 30 days, with a market share of over 40%, far exceeding its competitor Blur (23%), followed by Magic Eden (7.69%) and OKX NFT (5%).
According to wallet interaction data, nearly 70% of NFT trading users choose to complete transactions through OpenSea, while the combined share of Magic Eden, Blur and OKX NFT platforms is less than 17%.
As the overall popularity of the NFT industry has recovered, trading activities have also shown signs of recovery. According to CryptoSlam data, the number of NFT buyers in the past seven days exceeded 359,000, a surge of 52% from the previous week; among them, the sales of the top NFT series CryptoPunks soared 82% year-on-year, and monthly sales rebounded to US$20 million.
With a 7-fold increase, can Morius develop independently?
The NFT market seems to be emerging from the cold winter.
Currently, Morius has announced a partnership with Memeland, and the two parties will connect Web2 and Web3 communities to open up a new content distribution channel. According to opensea data, Moriusas current floor price is 0.38 ETH, which is 7 times higher than the offering price of 0.05 ETH. Most of the communities that call orders come from Japan and European and American communities, and Chinese attention is slightly blank.
As of press time, Moriusas trading volume has reached 374 ETH, making it one of the top ten in Openseas 24-hour trading volume. Can Moriusa turn the tide on Opensea as NFTs are picking up? Can the overall popularity of the NFT market continue to increase?
