I suspect that most of it does not come from outside of the current ETH (or whatever) ecosystem. I'd bet that most of the volume comes from people who are either treating it as play money, or trying to pump the NFT scam for their own benefit (real or imagined).
Not possible to trace where the money is coming from.
In fact, someone can "sell" an NFT to themself in a wash trade between two wallets they control. The last trade price of the NFT is now recorded as the transaction price, but it's possible that money never actually changed hands.
Want to have an expensive NFT? Just trade it to yourself for as much money as you have in your crypto wallet. You keep the money, you keep the NFT, but now everyone can see that someone "paid" a certain amount for it.
I heard rumors this is what happened with the Beeple nft
E: I looked around a bit and can't find any source for this, so I guess it's just a rumor?
However, an auction house is going to take significant fees as a percentage of the sale price and your shill bidder will want a cut as well. You’re also going to get a large tax bill because you technically had a realized capital gain and the auction house will report it.
With NFTs you can do a blockchain transaction for a relatively small fee by yourself from your computer. No taxes owed because you didn’t actually sell anything.
It can be used for various scams and as an investment, but the whole premise is ridicolous: people pay for art since they like it and want to own it. (And in this NFT scam they dont own anything useful)
Chain analysis is certainly something you can do.
You can use TornadoCash on Ethereum & this was used in a recent scandal involving NFTs by the ex-head of product of openseas.
Unless you know who the buyers and sellers are or transaction fees are high (like an auction at Christie's), you have no idea if the sales are real, so it's pretty easy to make it look like the asset is appreciating when it's really just manufactured hype.
Probably 1/2 money laundering and 1/2 rich people that have too much cash and ran out of ideas.
"Ecosystem" is a word that I believe sprung to life in the 70s, referring to the entire collection of organisms inhabiting a 'place', along with the weather conditions etc. in that place. The term was coined because without it, you need (or rather, I needed) 16 words to express it.
So it bothers me when people use the term to refer to collections of stuff that's never been alive: the Java ecosystem, the cryptocurrency ecosystem. These are not "ecosystems" - they're called "systems".
See also "epicentre".
Upvoted - I appreciate the observation about where the NFT volume comes from.
"ecosystem" denotes an environment created by some kind of vessel e.g. Earth, the ocean, Ethereum, etc where independent entities can be created, develop, and compete for resources, attention, space, etc provided by that environment. The entities have no real connection to their environment besides just living within it and interacting with the other entities.
Ethereum is just as much of an environment as the Earth is. It provides the foundation which the entities live on top of (security), the resources the entity needs to exist (data availability), and the gathering point where complex interactions can happen (smart contracts and end users). Ethereum doesn't build any of the ecosystem, it simply provides the marketplace where life happens.
I don't agree that systems have to be designed.
I mean, it depends on what you mean by "system" - was The Capitalist System designed? Who designed it? The atmosphere is a system, by most standards; it wasn't designed (or if it was, I'll shoot the designer). The human brain has most of the properties I'd expect a "system" to have; but hopefully you share my view that it wasn't designed.
But I'm not really bothered what a "system" is. I was just having a rant about words that used to mean something specific, until they were borged by lazy opinion-formers and made into cliches, rendering them useless for their original specific denotation. C.f. "epicenter".
(This seems to be a thing I care about more than other people; discount my remarks accordingly)