Key highlights:
- January 2023 is the month in which NFT trading volume reached the highest levels since August 2022.
- With 5 days to the end of the month, the trading volume of Ethereum NFTs on OpenSea has exceeded $368M.
- Ethereum, the leader in NFT trading volume, is followed by Solana.
While the price of cryptocurrencies continued to rise, the long-awaited rise in NFT trading volume also came. Market-leading marketplace OpenSea has increased its trading volume in Ethereum-based NFTs for the second month in a row, according to Dune data. OpenSea, which managed to increase its trade volume for two consecutive months in January 2022, repeated this in January 2023.
As of January 26, 2023, a total of $368M of NFT sales were made on OpenSea in January. This is also the highest figure recorded since August 2023. ETH’s gain of 33.5% since the beginning of the year has a great share in reaching these levels. On the other hand, NFT sales volume in terms of ETH in December 2022 was 227,419 while 257,000 ETH was on the 26th day of January.
Records in trading volume for Ethereum NFTs on OpenSea, both in USD and ETH basis, were broken in January 2022. January 2022 saw a trading volume of 1,604,546 ETH and 4,857,435,382 USD. Especially in June 2022, there was a great decrease in the trade volume, and the sector is still not considered to have recovered.
NFT Sales, Transactions, and Buyers Increase at Opensea
According to Cryptoslam data, among the 15 most popular Ethereum NFT collections, Beanz has increased its sales the most in the last month with 157%. CryptoPunks was the leader in the transaction increase rate with 58%, while the number of Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT owners increased by 58%. BAYC and MAYC share the first two places in terms of trade volume, while Sewer Pass is surprisingly in third place.
The Sewer Pass is a collection of NFTs that have access to the upcoming Dookey Dash web game, released for Bored Ape Yacht Club members. NFTs in the collection, which has sold $47M, are often traded on OpenSea as Yuga Labs blocks NFT marketplaces such as LooksRare and Blur. Yuga Labs has complained about NFT marketplaces that don’t pay creative royalties.
On the other hand, Yuga Labs, which has 6 collections out of 10 collections with high transaction volume, alone represents almost half of the NFT transaction volume on the Ethereum blockchain.
Blockchains are in the Race too
Looking at the last 30 days, Ethereum is the leader with NFT sales of $733M, followed by Solana, which increased its sales by 82%. Cardano, ImmutableX, and Polygon complete the top five places, respectively. It is noteworthy that Polygon NFT trading volume fell by 59%.
While more and more blockchains are racing within the NFT world, none can come close to Ethereum and Solana yet. In particular, the number of transactions in WAX is very high, but the fact that none of the popular collectibles are on the WAX network and in-game items are often traded there does not put WAX in the top 10 NFT blockchains.
