NFT is no doubt the one under the spotlight in cryptocurrency market 2021.
We can hardly tell whether it’s the development of OpenSea that brought NFT up or NFT’s burst in popularity made OpenSea famous, but OpenSea is definitely the monopoly in NFT market. According to ConsenSys’s analysis, in 2021, OpenSea’s trade volume adds up to 97% of the whole NFT market. It’s dominating position is too obvious to not be seen.
According to OpenSea’s trade volume statistics, NFT market development can be divided into several stages:
1.Indifferent: Feb 2021 (monthly trading volume has been below 10 million USD for a long time, sometimes even less than one million)
2.Preliminary development: February - June 2021 (monthly trading volume maintained at 100 million to 150 million USD, 10x explosive growth)
3.Getting ready: July 2021 (compared to the previous five months, the monthly transaction volume has doubled to more than 320 million USD)
4.Unstoppable: August 2021 (monthly transaction volume increased by ten times compared with the previous month and reached its peak, exceeding 3.4 billion USD)
5.Heat dropped: September - November 2021 (monthly transaction volume shows a decreasing trend month by month, compared its peak in August, in November decreased by 44%)
- Stabilization: December 2021 - present (the transaction volume of December is similar to that of November, and it tends to be stable)
It’s quite intuitive to see that NFT market is highly volatile, same as cryptocurrency market, it tends to fluctuate in an very small amount of time. A big jump rather than hierarchic bars marks its pattern. Although OpenSea had most trade volume in August, more NFTs were sold in September. And the lagging growth in the number of active trading users also reflects this.
However, the basis of the surge still relies on long-term preparation, which is in line with the characteristics of the cryptocurrency market that most rewards are given to early users and loyal users. Active users in December are currently second only to the peak in October, this helps stabilizing the NFT market.
The total number of active user who has traded on OpenSea is over 850 thousand and OpenSea has 300 thousand active users on a monthly basis.
Even during its downside, OpenSea’s daily trading volume is stabilized at a level between 50 million and 100 million USD, and sometimes the number can exceed 150 million USD.
Nowadays NFT has become an inseparable part of crypto market, but the FOMO sentiment brought along with it has also increased the asset bubble.