Popular NFT marketplace OpenSea touched USD 5 billion in trading volume in January 2022. The sales figure was its highest of all time. The previous high was USD 3.4 billion which was recorded for the month of August 2021.
The sales volume was reportedly spread across the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. While Ethereum made up a combined total of USD 4.95 billion of the trading volume, Polygon accounted for USD 79 million.
Record sale that points to growing popularity of NFTs
Highest trading volume on 31 January
Dailycoin reported that the results were compiled from Dune Analytics’ publicly available blockchain data.
The data reveals that January 31, 2022, was the best trading day on OpenSea. On that day, NFT trade worth USD 233 million was conducted on the platform. In other words, around USD 10 million worth of NFTs was sold per hour on the day.
But there have been hiccups on the way. Dailycoin reports that OpenSea had to recently refund around 750 Ethereum (ETH), or USD 1.8 million to its users who had sold costly NFTs at high discounts.
When the concern was raised by users, OpenSea co-founder, Alex Atallah, responded with a tweet saying, “Preventing this is our #1 company priority – we have a team working on it and putting up a countermeasure now.”
Preventing this is our #1 company priority – we have a team working on it and putting up a countermeasure now
— Alex Atallah | OpenSea (alexatallah.eth) (@xanderatallah) January 27, 2022
What is OpenSea?
OpenSea is one of the biggest and most reputed NFT marketplaces in the world.
Some of the world’s most expensive NFTs and famous collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club are available for trade on the platform.
It raised USD 300 million in Series C funding led by Paradigm and Coatue in January 2022 and is currently valued at USD 13.3 billion. Around six months before the January funding, OpenSea was valued at just around USD 1.5 billion.
Announcing the funding in a blog post on 4 January, co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer noted that the “NFT ecosystem explode last year, with OpenSea’s transaction volume increasing over 600x in 2021.”
(Main and Featured images: Andrey Metelev/@metelevan/Unsplash)
Manas Sen Gupta writes at the intersection of tech, entertainment and history. His works have appeared in publications such as The Statesman, Myanmar Matters, Hindustan Times and News18/ETV. In his spare time, Manas loves studying interactive charts and topographic maps. When not doing either, he prefers reading detective fiction. Spring is his favourite season and he can happily eat a bowl of noodles any time of the day.
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