NFT Marketplace OpenSea Sees Surge In Trading Volume, Processes

The market for nonfungible tokens appears to be reviving, with OpenSea already handling more volume daily than it did in the entire year of 2020.

OpenSea Trading Volume Soars
Over the weekend, OpenSea, a prominent marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), generated approximately $55 million in trade volume, about five times more than the entire year of 2020.

Devin Finzer, the co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, tweeted on August 2 that the platform processed $95 million in two days.

In 2020, OpenSea did about $21M in total transaction volume.

In the last two days, we did $95M.

The growth curve for NFTs is insane.

— Devin Finzer (dfinzer.eth) (@dfinzer) August 2, 2021

Finzer estimates that OpenSea processed $21 million in traffic throughout 2021, and that the marketplace’s daily transaction value has increased by more than 650 times since 2020.

This places OpenSea alongside industry giants like SpaceX, Stripe, Revolut, and others.

According to DappRadar statistics, OpenSea is extending its lead over competing NFT marketplaces, with daily volumes of $543,000 and $248,000 for SuperRare and Rarible, respectively.

Rarible outpaced OpenSea in 2020, with the platform hosting more than $24 million in volume last year, while OpenSea now has 150 times the volume of Rarible. Despite falling further down the rankings, Rarible’s daily volume has nearly quadrupled since 2020.

SupeRare processed around $6 million in transactions last year, according to Dune Analytics, amounting to roughly $16,400 every day on average. As a result, the volume of SupreRare has expanded by more than 33 times since 2020.

The enormous transaction volumes seen by OpenSea coincide with another surge in the NFT industry.

Collectors, many of whom are willing to pay millions of dollars, are becoming increasingly interested in these provably unique crypto tokens, which effectively function as digital credentials of ownership.

Unicorn After $100M Raise
While spectacular in and of itself, the new record is unsurprising for a crypto company that recently became a unicorn after raising another $100 million in a Series B fundraising round from top investors led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The marketplace stated that it intends to use the funds to grow into international markets and support several blockchains on its platform in order to make NFTs more accessible to a wider audience.

The $100 million fund increased OpenSea’s market cap to $1.5 billion. OpenSea continues to extend its infrastructure to accommodate additional users, with the CEO calling NFTs as the “new internet.”

The NFT market has reached new heights in the recent week, as markets have seen record-breaking transfers. These digital artifacts saw a lot of movement over the weekend.

The average price of CryptoPunks, one of the first collections of pixelated avatars in the form of NFTs, soared by over 50% amid enormous buy-ins made by mystery crypto whales, coinciding with OpenSea’s newest transaction volume record.

CryptoPunks were the most popular item on OpenSea during the past week, according to the platform’s own rankings.

Over the last seven days, the total trading volume of these NFTs on the platform was over 49,200 ETH (approximately $128 million at current prices).