NFT market is spinning freely – exponential growth at OpenSea
2 min read
OpenSea, the largest platform for non-fungible tokens (NFT) is currently no longer stopping. The growth brings back bad memories of the hype in the crypto sector of 2017.
on OpenSea is the bear tapping (or should we say the bull?). Because since the beginning of the month, the NFT marketplace has seen an exponential increase in trading volume that is second to none. Alone in the first half of August came on OpenSea a volume of a respectable 800 million US dollars.
For comparison: In the entire month of July it was “only” 284 million US dollars, in June it was only 125 million US dollars. This is based on data from DappRadar emerged. In the meantime, however, the increase in volume may have reached its preliminary peak. Because since August 14, activity on the largest trading exchange for non-fungible tokens (NFT) has been falling sharply. Most recently it was $ 35 million, less than half of the previous day.
If you apply the standard a little further, it becomes clear that the NFT hype is slowly but surely navigating its way into bladder territory. After all, growth since the beginning of the year has been a whopping 12,000 percent. In 2021, the platform also had over a billion US dollars in trading volume, according to analyst Mason Nystrom Twitter writes.
Despite everything: crypto exchanges still represent the majority of the crypto market; With over 24 billion US dollars per day, Binance alone processed a multiple of the trading volume of OpenSea.
How the exponential growth on the platform founded in 2017 can be explained is of course not yet fully understood. One possible explanation for the hype are individual drops such as “Pigments” by Darien Brito, a 1,000-part series of animated NFT GIFs, some of which change hands for six-figure amounts.
Andreessen Horowitz involved in OpenSea
The NTF wave has long not only carried away experienced crypto veterans, but is also spreading to the traditional financial sector. In March, Cryptheory reported on a $ 23 million financing round for OpenSea led by venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz. Later, Ashton Kutcher and other donors also joined in, so that the previous 23 million should become a total of 100 million US dollars. As a result, the company came to a valuation of 1.5 billion US dollars – so now joins the ranks of unicorns.
On OpenSea, investors can bid on a whole range of non-fungible tokens such as digital works of art, collectibles, music or domain names. Most of the time, the trading processes are then mapped on the ETH blockchain, which sometimes leads to a barely manageable network load and has already persuaded the developers to change their fee model.
