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Network Coverage
Coverage on OpenSea, Foundation, Rarible, BAYC, and Arweave.

• OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace, controlling ~94% of NFT volume on Ethereum. In 2021, OpenSea did $16B in trading volume (accounting for sales on both Ethereum and Polygon). This is a 660x increase from OpenSea’s 2020 volume of $24M. August was an all-time high for the platform with $3.47B in volume.

• 1.26M unique wallets have bought or sold an NFT on OpenSea in 2021 (accounting for sales on both Ethereum and Polygon). This is a 47x increase from 2020, when 27k unique wallets traded on the platform. September had the highest number of monthly active users with 525k active wallets.

• Since EIP-1559 was implemented in August, the base gas fee for every Ethereum transaction has been burned. OpenSea transactions have burned 149k ETH, more than any other Ethereum-based application. OpenSea is responsible for ~11% of all the ETH that has been burned.

  

• After only one month of opening up access for users to create their own custom contracts, there has been 2,000+ ETH volume across 2,100+ collections. Collections are custom contracts that allow users to create their own smart contract and mint NFTs to it - they are like folders that allow creators to organize their works. For context on how quickly this feature is becoming a staple of the Ethereum ecosystem, this product has already enabled ~7% of all ERC-721 contracts ever created.

• Collection sales volume has been growing exponentially. Creators across various categories are selling rapidly, such as @omarzrobles (photography), @nguyenhut (animation), @geregamo (illustration) - all of whom have sold 30+ ETH via collections.

• Daily unique bidders for collection NFTs continues to increase. Collectors are increasingly becoming aware of the potential of owning NFTs that are part of scarce collections and we expect this trend to continue as these types of NFTs continue to rise in popularity.

• Over the past half year, Rarible made an effort to expand on its collectibles market, including the collection leaderboard, trading statistics, and filters by traits. At the end of December, Rarible started to aggregate other marketplaces orders which brought $5.6m in a week alone. These activities brought structural change to the GMV distribution. Items minted outside Rarible generated 67% of GMV in December, compared to up to 20% until September.

  

• Further expanding on which collections contributed to GMV, the marketplace saw $2.1m PHAYC, $1.2m Crypto Stars, $1.1m CryptoPhunks, $1.0m OpenSea Shared Storefront, $1.0m Adidas Originals, and $0.6m Bored Apes among the top 10 non-Rarible collections that generated volume in Dec 21.

• This increase is happening amidst the all-time-high traffic to the Rarible front-end with DAU & MAU increasing 8-fold since the lowest points in August 2021. On January 6, DAU was 159k and MAU was 2.3m.