Refik Anadol NFT collab with Brazilian tribe yields $3.9 million in a week

Cutting-edge artist Refik Anadol's latest digital art collection dubbed "Winds of Yawanawa" may be the one lone bright spot in an otherwise dim NFT market. 

The project, a collection of "data paintings," has generated $3.9 million (2,493 ether) in sales over the past week, according to OpenSea data. The eruption of interest in Winds of Yawanawa, a collaboration between the Brazilian indigenous community Yawanawa and Anadol, comes amid a broader NFT market downturn that has seen trading volumes plummet by more than 90% since a bull run bolstered by excitement for mostly low-resolution picture-for-profile NFT collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks.

One popular NFT watcher took to X to highlight both the success of Winds of Yawanawa and how large of a portion of overall trading the collection accounted for in a day's worth of trading.

"Winds of Yawanawa did 451 ETH of volume on OpenSea yesterday, about 25% of the total ETH volume on OpenSea," posted @punk9059, director of research at Proof Collective, an organization that supports blockchain-powered art. "What's striking is partially how much [Winds of Yawanawa] is doing, but also how little else is trading."

PFPs's slipping popularity

The waning popularity of pricey PFP NFTs may signal a larger shift away from simpler tokenized projects, based less on artistic craftsmanship and more on belonging to an exclusive club, toward more ambitious pieces minted on the blockchain. Pieces in the Winds of Yawanawa are not stationary and instead evolve visually and continually shift, not completely unlike a sophisticated screensaver.

Winds of Yawanawa NFTs "harness weather data from the tribe's village in the Amazon rainforest including wind speed, gusts, direction and temperature," according to the collection's OpenSea page. "This data then merges with the works of young Yawanawa artists, resulting in a mesmerizing play of traditional shapes and colors of data pigmentation."

While NFTs in the Winds of Yawanawa have a floor price of about $18,300, one piece, #503, sold for roughly $26,000 on Tuesday.