Published on Aug 23, 2021

Down the Rabbit Hole: OpenSea, Diving into the sea of NFTs

Author: Rubin
#Insights
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Down the Rabbit Hole: OpenSea, Diving into the sea of NFTs

NFTs are starting to become the evergreen trend, these non-fungible digital assets are being auctioned at the speed of light. When it comes to platforms that are built for the masses, OpenSea stands out. From the humble beginning as a startup in 2017 and raising funds from YCW18, it has claimed to become the biggest NFT giant the world has ever known.

Rush for NFTs

It all exploded with Twitter CEO selling his first tweet as an NFT for $2.9M and when Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, sold an NFT for $69.3M. NFTs were known way before, but both of these events were significant in introducing NFTs to the masses.

Since then web3 has seen many auctions, and many of them match the price of its physical counterparts. According to Dune, there are 738,716 users on OpenSea. Source: https://dune.xyz/rchen8/opensea

NFT-verse ~ DeFi-verse?

So, it’s clear that user growth was exponential, but are they even using the platform? Well, there’s one way to find out by checking gas consumption. To give you a glimpse, Uniswap has topped this leaderboard since last year.

After the much-welcomed EIP-1559 (Ethereum’s Fee Market Upgrade), OpenSea was responsible for burning 9699.67 ETH in gas, much more than the DeFi giant Uniswap V2 (5645.81 ETH) & Uniswap V3 (2378.47 ETH).

Even when combined, they were able to burn a total of 8024.28 ETH, which suggests ~17% more Ethereum consumption by the NFT platform – OpenSea.

Source: https://dune.xyz/k06a/Ethereum-after-1559 as of 23rd August, ’21

Trading NFT is more fun!

OpenSea has witnessed a hefty trading volume in 2021 alone. Starting with a humble ~$20-50M in January ’21, it recently crossed $1Billion as of August ’21. Plus, the crazy part is that there are only 300K users (figure from glassnode) currently trading on OpenSea. With an exponential increase in users and more projects launching their NFTs on OpenSea, we could see tremendous volume growth in the near future.

Recently OpenSea crossed a valuation of $1.5B and raised $100M in funding from a16z. It also became the first-ever cross-blockchain platform. But what makes OpenSea worth $1.5B is hidden in its great community. Majorly, new projects choose OpenSea as their go-to platform to deliver their NFTs. It is a marketplace that allows you to sell various NFTs such as Digital art, Music, Virtual lands, 3d characters, and pretty much anything you want. Being such a flexible and supportive platform, growth has no bounds.

Summing Up

OpenSea is a user-first NFT platform. With its expansion to Polygon and the introduction of gasless creation/buying/selling of NFTs, it has since attracted many newcomers (artists and traders) to the crypto-nft space and thus becoming everyone’s go-to NFT marketplace.


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