By Alicia Maher
One regularly overlooked section of the cryptocurrency market is NFTs. They have historically been largely neglected by beginner and veteran blockchain enthusiasts alike. Over the past year, however, they have started to gain steady traction and have seen increased use in multiple industries across the board. From fashion to gaming, many people are beginning to take note of the previous underdog.
A large beneficiary of this boom has been the popular NFT marketplace OpenSea. Over the past month, it has seen amazing profit margins as NFTs continue to rise in popularity with many people now looking to NFTs as an alternative to traditional crypto trading. OpenSea has been having a good year with the company’s valuation reaching $1.5 billion in July after securing $100 million in funding led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
76,000% Increase In Trade Volume Over the Past Year
As NFTs see increasing use amidst an ongoing market rally, OpenSea has become an increasingly visited destination as the retailer of choice for most as the auctioneer of choice. The NFT marketplace has witnessed a near unparalleled growth of over 76,000% in the past year. OpenSea co-founder and CEO, Devin Finzer commented on this growth on Twitter recently stating that the marketplace had seen $1 billion in trading volume in the month of August alone and even going further to imply that this was just the beginning of NFT popularity. This comes off the back of increased traffic to the website when American-based magazine fortune elected to use them in what they called “a live trading experiment”. Devin Finzer’s assertions are corroborated by popular analytics website DappRadar with the website showing a trading volume of $1.24 billion in the past 30 days. This marks a 935% increase over the previous period.
NFTs gains are nothing to scoff at as they are even beginning to challenge the transaction volumes seen on traditional trading websites. Earlier this month, OpenSea topped the leaderboard for gas fees over a 24-hour period, a spot usually dominated by popular exchange protocol Uniswap. Whilst this might not seem remarkable at first glance, gas fees are a reliable indicator of the user volume on a particular network and OpenSea taking the spot from Uniswap shows that to some extent, NFTs are beginning to become a strong contender for dominance in crypto. Over that period, Opensea had $1.9 million paid in gas fees alone on the platform while Uniswap came in second place with a significantly lower amount at $1.57 million.
With the price of Ether continuing to rise behind Bitcoin, NFTs will continue to see use as more industries start to take notice of them. They have recently seen use in a wide range of areas including, art, gaming, music with many more people beginning to get involved.