Bored Ape Yacht Club drives 196% spike in weekly NFT sales. These were the 5 best-selling digital collections.

• NFTs have had a breakthrough year, and over the past 12 months, volume has hit $28 billion.
• This week, a spike in Bored Ape Yacht Club helped drive weekly NFT sales to more than $1 billion.
• These are the top five digital collectibles that helped drive $1.3 billion in NFT sales over the past week.

The cryptocurrency boom over the past few years has helped propel a newer market to record heights: digital collectibles known as NFTs.

The craze has pushed total NFT sales volume to $28 billion over the past year as artists, investors, and entrepreneurs descend upon the nascent Web3 space.

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique, irreplaceable, mostly digital items that users buy and sell online.

NFTs use blockchain technology to keep a digital record of ownership, similar to cryptocurrencies. They were first launched on ethereum, the same blockchain that supports the cryptocurrency ether, and most NFTs can still only be purchased using ether.

A months-long sell-off in cryptocurrencies has taken a bite out of NFT sales more recently. Weekly NFT sales had been more than cut in half from its early January peak of nearly $1 billion, according to data from NonFungible.com.

But the past week has seen weekly NFT sales soar 196% to $1.3 billion from $456 million in the prior week, in part due to a resurgence in the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, which was knocked from its usual top spot last week by Moonbirds.

These were the five best-selling collections over the past week, according to NonFungible.

5. CloneX

7-Day Sales Volume: $19.2 million
Number of Sales: 442
Highest Sale Price: $260,000

Explainer: "CloneX Corp was founded by three extraterrestrials who came from the planet of Orbitar in the Draco constellation. These interplanetary tourists have come to accelerate our evolution towards an immaterial existence. They plan to transfer all human consciousness into advanced clone forms to create the ultimate metaverse."

4. Doodles

7-Day Sales Volume: $22.6 million
Number of Sales: 474
Highest Sale Price: $168,000

Explainer: "Doodles come in a joyful range of colors, traits, and sizes with a collection size of 10,000. Doodles are a funky bunch that like to role play or transmogrify themselves into delicious treats. Holding a Doodle allows you to participate in coordinating the Doodles Community Treasury."

3. Azuki

7-Day Sales Volume: $23.2 million
Number of Sales: 401
Highest Sale Price: $868,000

Explainer: "Azuki is a collection of 10,000 avatars that grant membership access to The Garden. The Garden is a corner of the internet where art, community, and culture fuse to create magic. The lines between physical and digital worlds are blurring and the rules are being rewritten."

2. Moonbirds

7-Day Sales Volume: $29.2 million
Number of Sales: 333
Highest Sale Price: $199,000

Explainer: "Moonbirds is the continuation and evolution of the PROOF project, led by PROOF Collective. This collection represents 10,000 owls randomly generated on the Ethereum blockchain with a pixel art design. Owning a Moonbird grants the holder access to the metaverse of PROOF: Project Highrise."

1. Bored Ape Yacht Club

7-Day Sales Volume: $196.1 million
Number of Sales: 1,733
Highest Sale Price: $743,000

Explainer: "BAYC is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs -- unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card, and grants access to members-only benefits."