The largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea has been all over the news lately. Taking momentum from the whole NFT fervor, the platform garnered a huge following. While the craze around non-fungible tokens persists, OpenSea was perishing.
As the world undergoes digital metamorphosis, everything digital is reigning markets. The buzz around NFTs was so high that even a person living under a rock knew about NFTs. Phrases like ‘NFTs are the future’ were making the rounds all over social media. But are NFTs really the future?
For months together, NFTs managed to amass massive trading volume. However, February wasn’t a favorable month for the NFT space. The overall NFT trading volume reportedly fell by 85% over the last 30 days.
The reason behind this could be the tremendous downfall in OpenSea’s monthly volume during the month of February.
OpenSea in February
2022 started off as a great year for OpenSea. Users flocked into the space further influencing the volume of the platform. However, this hot streak did not persist through February. Both, the monthly, as well as the daily volume of Ethereum on OpenSea, took a major hit.
As per the above charts, the monthly volume procured by the platform was at 3,164,780,826 USD. Previously in January, the monthly volume was at 4,954,858,223 USD. The daily volume mirrored a similar notion.
Additionally, this was the same case for the Polygon chain on the NFT platform.
The disparity between these months highlights the dropping interest of users in the platform. But what’s the reason behind this significant drop?
Are hacks and attacks scaring people away?
It’s no secret that OpenSea has been exploited in recent months. Back in January, the platform saw a front-end attack that caused the loss of nearly 347 ETH worth about $800k. Following this, the network decided to oust NFTs that were no longer active. During this process, about 35 users lost funds as a result of a phishing attack. While the second attack wasn’t allegedly OpenSea’s fault, the platform still amassed a haters’ club.
As all of this wasn’t enough, Timothy McKimmy was suing the NFT marketplace for selling his Bored Ape NFT without this knowledge.
Even though the NFT marketplace is on its toes working towards making the platform safer, the community was visibly losing interest.
In the meantime, speculations of Coinbase’s upcoming NFT marketplace is expected to put OpenSea out of business. The exchange’s waitlist for the marketplace has already managed to bag over 3.7 million signatures.
It’s a bad month, not a bad year. While February was a rough month for the largest NFT marketplace, March could turn out to be different.