Japanese IP Moriusa soared 7 times and set off an on-chain craze, and the NFT market bottomed out and rebounded?

Author: Patti, ChainCatcher

Edited by: TB, ChainCatcher

A force from the East is setting off a wave of NFT.

This Thursday night, Moriusa (すとぷ㊊) NFT launched Opensea, with a price of 0.05 ETH, and the market was extremely hot, and its floor price once soared to 0.44 ETH.

While users in the Chinese area were still confused, Moriusa had been blown up by Japanese and English areas, and even tried her best to push the gas fee on the ETH chain higher.

The image of Moriusa NFT was born in the popular Japanese IP - STPR's virtual idol group. It is a peripheral derivative of the virtual idol group. Mofees is a collection of Moriusas, each Moriusas has its own unique emotions and outfits.

YouTube related pages show that the current number of subscriptions to the strawberryprince channel has reached 3.63 million, and the large number of purchases this time also come from its offline IP audience, concentrated in Japan and Europe and the United States.

Yellen, a Chinese NFT player, revealed that the Chinese community has hardly participated in Moriusa's cooperation this time, but Moriusa NFT is extremely popular in Japan and the English area.

In fact, this is not the first time that NFT has collided with Japanese anime culture. As a global industry, its industrial derivatives are just a long-lasting topic. It uses the popular NFT form to link offline fans with the online community, becoming a breakthrough for many cultural IPs to create economic value, including "One Piece", "Death", "Attack on Titan" and many IPs under Miyazaki Studio Ghibli Studio have derived their own IP products, but since most of them are released on Japanese local platforms, such as LINE NFT, Fantop, etc., it is relatively unfamiliar to Chinese users, and its scope of influence and economic effects are also limited.

Moriusa NFT is attracted by this pain point. As early as January this year, STPR announced to fans that it would launch an "overseas development project". Choosing to publish it on the overseas platform Opensea can use the popularity of Japanese local fans to drive the on-chain popularity of NFT, thereby attracting the attention of overseas markets to this local IP.

Moriusa breaks the circle and detonates OpenSea. Can the NFT recovery

return to its peak?

At present, the overall activity of the NFT market continues to be sluggish, and leading NFT trading platforms such as 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, down 61% from US$4.1 billion in the same period in 2024.

In August 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a "Wells Notice" to OpenSea, accusing some of its platform's NFTs that could constitute "unregistered securities" and threatened to file a lawsuit. This news seemed to add insult to injury, causing the already weak NFT market to cool down. Data shows that OpenSea's share in the Ethereum NFT market fell from 97% at the beginning of 2022 to around 20% at the end of 2024, and its platform status is in jeopardy.

The turning point began at the beginning of this year, when OpenSea launched the public beta version of the new generation platform OS2. At the same time, the SEC announced the suspension of investigation into OpenSea, and the temporary easing of regulatory pressure has gained breathing space for the platform. With the double positive, OpenSea quickly regained its dominance in the NFT trading market.

According to the latest data from NFTScan, the OpenSea platform's trading volume has been firmly ranked first in the past 30 days, with market share exceeding 40%, far exceeding competitors Blur (23%), and Magic Eden (7.69%) and OKX NFT (5%) ranked behind.

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 rebounds, trading activities also show signs of recovery. According to CryptoSlam data, the number of NFT buyers exceeded 359,000 in the past seven days, a 52% surge from the previous week; among them, 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 emerge from an independent market?

The NFT market seems to be emerging from the cold winter.

At present, Morius has announced a cooperation with Memeland, and the two parties will connect Web2 and Web3 communities to open up new content distribution channels. According to opensea data, Moriusa's current floor price is 0.38 ETH, which is 7 times the price of 0.05 ETH. Most of the order-calling communities come from Japanese and European and American communities, and the Chinese attention is a little blank.

As of press time, Moriusa's trading volume has reached 374 ETH, shortlisted in the top ten trading volumes of opensea 24H. Can Moriusa turn the tide on opensea at the moment when NFTs are recovering? Can the overall popularity of the NFT market continue to increase?