NFTs are selling like hotcakes; recently, individual NFT sales on Polygon surpassed Ethereum via lending overall marketplace OpenSea, two months in a row. This data came to light from the curated data of the Dune dashboard.
The first month of 2023 has proven to be better for the whole crypto industry as it is trying to recover from the debacles of 2022. Where OpenSea handled more than 1.5 million NFTs sales on Polygon, an Ethereum side-chain, and at the same time, Ethereum’s very own mainnet managed over 1.1 million sales through the same marketplace. In December 2022, the data showed 1.3 million sales on Polygon while under 1 million sales on Ethereum NFTs.
Ethereum has always been considered to be the leading blockchain for NFTs, and despite relatively higher gas fees, it hosts some major high-value projects. Meanwhile, Polygon keeps on forging larger brand deals with the likes of Meta, Reddit and Starbucks, along with additional game projects tapping the scaling network, where more and more assets are being traded on the side-chain.
Ethereum merge came in September 2022, reducing the mainnet’s energy consumption by 99.998%. Still, the step could not resolve the problem of network gas fees, which sometimes were more than the asset price. It should be known that the Ethereum network charges a gas fee to complete a transaction.
On the contrary, Polygon and layer-1 Ethereum rivals in the market, such as Solana or Avalanche, offer aggressively lower fees. Making them expected choices for hosting more affordable NFT collections.
Per OperSea, the top Polygon NFT collection sold in January was the controversial Donald Trump digital trading cards. They made 5,500 sales on Polygon while only 1,743 sales on Ethereum. Studying the data of Polygon, it managed the highest sales across the marketplaces; for example, Planet IX had 5 million sales, Sunflower Land had 1 million sales, Macovercse had 42,000 sales, and Lympo Athletes managed 37,000 sales last month.
It must be taken into consideration that the majority of these sales are of low-cost assets which are used in metaverse and Web3. For example, Sunflower Land and Planet IX, NFT assets are being sold for pennies worth of ETH; this brings down the average selling price for Polygon-based NFTs significantly over time.
Even though numbers suggest that Polygon surpassed Ethereum in the total number of sales, Ethereum somehow managed to have considerably more value traded. At OpenSea, Ethereum had nearly $446 million of total volume in January 2023, while Polygon NFT sales added to just $15.4 million. Taking into consideration the 1.5 million approx. NFT sales on Polygon, the average value gets to nearly $10.
The most desirable and costliest NFTS, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, is still live on Ethereum and is bringing more trading volume than Polygon. But the side-chain network is coming up as a destination for gaming NFTS and low–cost collectibles, aiding a broader NFT adoption.
Andrew is a blockchain developer who developed his interest in cryptocurrencies while his post-graduation. He is a keen observer of details and shares his passion for writing along with being a developer. His backend knowledge about blockchain helps him give a unique perspective to his writing
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/02/02/openseas-polygon-nft-sales-beat-ethereum-for-two-straight-months/