OpenSea has made strong moves in the NFT market in the past two months, growing its transaction volume almost 1400% since January. The closest competitor in the field is Rarible, and the two marketplaces have been head-to-head for quite some time. However, it looks like innovation at OPENSEA is pushing them in the lead.
In the first three weeks of March 2021 OpenSea recorded $82.5 million in transaction volume, against $24.2 million for Rarible. Rarible only scores higher on the amount of active wallets, which is a metric used for sellers, buyers, but also users to put their NFTs up for sale.
OpenSea introduced free minting for single NFTs, making it easier for artists and creators to sell their work. They announced support for the Polygon blockchain and started working with Flow. In March so far OpenSea had 3,100 active wallets per day, and the transaction volumes already surpassed those of February with 14% to $82,5 million. Rarible on the other hand now has 4,467 active wallets per day, and already increased its volume 50% to more than $24,2 million.
Seeing this amount of value and growth moving through OpenSea, makes the platform interesting for investors. It comes as no surprise that the marketplace recent secured $23 million in a Series A investment round led by A16z.
DappRadar makes live market data insightful through the NFTs Overview. Here users can see individual NFT sales, the top collections, and total volumes of the different marketplaces.
Active wallets vs Trading volumes
Rarible and OpenSea are among the most popular NFT marketplaces on the Ethereum blockchain. The two were neck-on-neck in January, but in February the two marketplaces noticed different growth patterns. Rarible is still dominant in terms of active wallets, but the biggest trading volumes happen on OpenSea.
During January Rarible had an average of 413 active users per day, against 307 active wallets for OpenSea. Also in terms of trading volume there wasn’t much difference between the two. OpenSea did $5.5 million that month, while Rarible had $3.3 million.
In February the two NFT marketplaces started to move apart. Both platform tripled their user base, while Rarible saw its transaction volume increase to $16 million. That’s five times the amount from January. At the same time OpenSea handled $72.5 million in volume, growing 14x in one month.
