The NFT marketplace’s sales recently hit $10 billion, while the growth of the non-fungible token industry shows no signs of slowing down.
OpenSea sales: $10 billion for the unicorn
Sales on OpenSea since the platform’s launch crossed the $10 billion mark over the weekend of November 6, 2021. The average selling price of NFTs reached $872 per token in parallel.
OpenSea’s success is based on the strong growth of the NFT sector in general, and more specifically the success of some major projects like Axie Infinity, which is the second largest NFT project in the cryptosphere. In fact, Axie Infinity sales account for 29.90 percent of OpenSea’s revenue. According to CryptoSlam’s data, Axie Infinity’s total revenue since launch is more than $2.9 billion.
Sales on OpenSea surpassed $10 billion just over 3 months after the platform raised $100 million, a funding round propelling it to unicorn status with a valuation estimated at the time at $1.5 billion.
Growth of NFTs: constantly increasing numbers
The growth of NFTs has not slowed down during the third quarter of 2021, while non-fungible tokens are experiencing ever-increasing demand since the beginning of the year. Nonfungible.com’s report on the NFT industry during the third quarter of 2021 reveals that active portfolios that interacted with an NFT smart contract, increased by 105.52% compared to the previous quarter.
The number of buyers, meanwhile, jumped 166.73% from 97,658 in Q2 to 260,489 in Q3. The number of sellers saw an even larger increase of 206.84% from the previous period.
The amount of U.S. dollar NFT exchanges increased from $782 million to $5.9 billion from Q2 to Q3.
What could bend OpenSea’s growth curve? Andre Cronje launched the decentralized NFT exchange dapp Artion that runs on Fantom (FTM), with the ambition to make it a direct competitor to OpenSea. And Artion has strong arguments to attract NFT projects, especially in terms of cost.
