ON–123: NFTs
May 27, 2022
About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.
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Network Coverage
Coverage on Magic Eden, OpenSea, STEPN, and Okay Bears.
- Magic Eden is the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. Over the past year, the chain emerged as a top NFT ecosystem from the expansion of Solana gaming and the rising prominence of Sol-native collections like Okay Bears and Trippin Ape Tribe; in fact, 24H NFT Solana volume almost flipped Eth mainnet this Wednesday. Magic Eden has defended its ~96% market share over the past few months and controls the vast majority of gaming volume outside of STEPN.
- Magic Eden’s DAU is tracking around 20k traders. With low gas fees and fast transactions, the marketplace sees multiple daily transactions per trader, on average. The average sale on Magic Eden tracks between ~3-6 SOL (~$150-$300).
- Magic Eden’s daily volume has grown consistently since early March, peaking at ~342k SOL this Tuesday (~$17.1m). Since launching, the marketplace’s cumulative volume recently passed ~16.7m SOL.
- OpenSea launched its Solana marketplace on 6th April. This was a huge step forward in OpenSea’s plans to become the leading cross-chain NFT marketplace. 650k SOL in trading volume has taken place on OpenSea’s Solana market.
- Since launch, 51k wallets have bought or sold an NFT on OpenSea’s Solana marketplace. The top collections by all-time trading volume are OK Bears, DeGods and Trippin’ Ape Tribe.
- Today, OpenSea is only a small fraction of overall Solana NFT volume, but its marketshare is growing. Last week, OpenSea accounted for 7% of Solana NFT trading volume.
STEPN is a Web3 fitness app with built-in gamified components. STEPN is built around an essential daily activity for most people – moving around.
Users equip themselves with NFT sneakers, and earn in-game token through walking, jogging, or running outdoors. Over the past two months, the STEPN app was able to grow the number of daily active users organically and steadily (thanks to the use of non-incentivized activation codes). Despite the growth, the % of users who mint sneakers within the total daily active users was able to stay at a relatively stable level. There is a a healthy level of volatility for this metric: there is no significant upward or downward trend being observed.
- Similarly, the % of users who use the app and cash out daily within the total daily active users swings steadily between 20% and 30% in April, and stabilizes at around 25% in May. This metric also did not go up as the users grow and indicated a healthy state of the economy.
- The average daily energy consumption per user shows the average in-app time per paid user. Such metric did not trend downward as the user base expanded - this indicates strong growth potential for the application.