If you are unaware about NFTs and the OpenSea marketplace now is a good time to learn about them. They have become quite a rage over the last year and many creators around the world are finding authenticity for their work and a source of income through NFTs.
A NFT is a unique token that is used to certify the provenance, authenticity and ownership of a piece of digital media. Similar to cryptocurrencies, these tokens are registered on a public blockchain. It is to be noted that every NFT is unique unlike cryptocurrencies where one Bitcoin or any other coin is identical to another.
Though there are quite a few NFT marketplaces, OpenSea is the world’s largest for creating and trading NFTs. Collections created and admired by the community such as CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yatch Club, and Ether Rocks have propelled the platform forward in a big way. Just over the last month, the company saw 266000 unique addresses in its transactions and the total monthly volume on August 23 was seen at $1.67 billion as reported produced by Dune Analyticsa. DAppsRadar is another popular decentralized apps tracker. This amount was almost half of its entire volume, a good reminder that NFTs have become quite a craze enough though the market is still in its early stages.
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The recent growth in Non Fungible Tokens as they are called comes at a time when the cryptocurrency market has started trending again after a brief correction that lasted a few months. The prices of popular cryptos such as Bitcoin have gone up again, with Bitcoin trading around $50,000 mark.
Big Sales Are Driving The NFT Market
The market has seen a lot of big sales which is driving it. This is not only in terms of revenue but also the creators who are selling. There has been a surge in celebrities and known creators who are joining the NFT space and this year has seen NFTs that have been minted by pop musician Katy Perry, rapper Jay-Z and even Tim Berners Lee who is known as the founder of the Internet. Tim had tied up with popular auction house Sotheby’s in June in order to sell the source code of the Internet as a NFT piece and the auction had sold out on a bid of over $5 million.
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Another interesting development in the NFT sector is the interest from sports personalities and institutions which has the potential to bring in a lot of new traders and buyers. Popular football clubs from all over the world have already started using NFTs. Just recently an Indian NFT platform, Ratio, launched cricked NFTs. Even USAs National Basketball Association (NBA) has got into the NFT rage.
The growth of OpenSea is a very positive signal for NFTs as the industry has been trying to gain credibility. Some experts suggest that scalability, interoperability between different blockchains, authenticity and storage could be an issue for NFT platforms in the future as it grows and this remains a challenge for platforms such as OpenSea which could use the increase in its revenue to tackle these factors while also increase in its promotional spends to attract new users.
Featured image by opensea.io, charts by TradingView.com