While OpeaSea remains on the dominant side, the popular and the largest marketplace have experienced a 90% fall in transaction volume over the first four months of 2022. Currently, the measure is around 84% for May and the percentage might increase based on the large demand for NFT marketplaces with reasonable minting fees and transaction costs.
As the NFT craze has dropped to some point compared to the year 2021, the overall volume of NFT transactions has also fallen to 20% month-over-month (MoM). According to the Dapp Radar May industry report issued on June 7, there is an alarming increase in the competition between various NFT marketplaces.
However, as the crypto market performance is bearish in the current scenario, the NFT community holds strong fundamental convictions in the NFT sector. According to NFTcalender data, there are 2416 NFT collections released on various platforms during May 2022. Out of these collections, more than 400 NFT collections were Ethereum-based. Meanwhile, the NFT collections released in January, February, March, and April were 4297, 4643, 4152, and 3046 respectively. A clear decline of 50% in the numbers in May as compared to previous months.
Also read: Top five blockchains to sell your NFT collections in 2022
NFT Marketplaces Dominance in Crypto Industry
Despite a significant fall, The OpenSea has recorded a 2% growth i.e. 398,000 in the number of unique average wallets (UAW) linked to the marketplace in May 2022. Whereas, marketplace aggregators such as Gem and Genie have provided popularity to LooksRare and X2Y2 by giving some vibrant insights into the NFT market on these platforms.
According to the Dapp Radar report, 30,000 UAW were engaged on LooksRare while improving the overall customer base numbers to 22% from its April data. The community-driven marketplace also recognized the growth of 473% in organic volumes giving $250 million in organic trades in May 2022.
Similarly, X2Y2 might not hold a strong position in terms of numbers in the industry, as it is 0.6% only according to NFT marketplace dominance reports by DappRadar. But due to the less trading fees which are 0.5%, the UAW has seemingly increased to 93% MoM attracting 11,500 UAW. Also, the marketplace produced $22 million in trading volume, which is a huge improvement from the previous month’s statistics.
Solana’s Magic Eden is doing very well in the industry. Thus giving a tough competition to OpenSea despite its huge trading volumes. While the overall traders increased by 12%, the average monthly transaction for May improved to $11.89 million i.e. by 26%. The number of users also spiked by 29,218,000 (9%).
Talking about the biggest loser, the Coinbase NFT marketplace stood first. However, Coinbase being the biggest centralized crypto exchange in the industry, its NFT marketplace experiment failed drastically. The platform generated only $2.5 million from its launch in April 2022. According to Dunes Analytics, it has only a small NFT user community of 1,200 members in May.
Conclusion
Despite the network outage and bearish industry, NFT marketplaces have somehow held up tight. Low transaction fees and minting costs, better user engagement, good user interface upliftment, and many other parameters are allowing users to interact more on these platforms. Moreover, users want to hold up with their NFT collectibles to get a good price when the market will go bullish.
Also read: How to buy land in metaverse: A step-by-step guide
