Market Share of Ethereum NFT Marketplaces

All’s fair in the competition of NFT marketplaces – we take a closer look at the market shares of the top 5 NFT marketplaces: OpenSea, x2y2, LooksRare, BloctoBay and Magic Eden.

Amidst the NFT bear, OpenSea continues to lose market share

NFTs continue to dump and see lower volumes, down 593% since January 2022. Meanwhile, NFT market leader OpenSea sees its lowest monthly trading volume in August 2022, down 450% from its previous record high in March 2022.

The increase of x2y2

x2y2 originally launched in February 2022 with a massive vampire attack on OpenSea. Despite its incentives to wash-trade, the protocol did not take off until recently, in May, when volumes picked up. x2y2 has since passed OpenSea on Ethereum in June and has maintained its #1 position for Ethereum NFTs.

A few factors have driven x2y2’s growth. First, the growing popularity of NFT aggregators such as Gem and Genie allows buyers to buy NFT collections across different marketplaces in a single transaction. Extra features like rarity ratings and cheaper gas costs are attractive and can make users marketplace agnostic.

With a simplified user experience, price (sales fees) becomes the most critical consideration.

x2y2 is currently the cheapest on Ethereum, with only a 0.5% selling fee (fees were lowered in July). Compare this to OpenSea at 2.5% and MagicEden and LooksRare at 2%. BloctoBay’s selling fees are technically 2.5%, but they are the only platform that enforces a flat 7.5% royalty fee. Other platforms allow creators to dictate their royalty fees.

In August, x2y2 made a controversial decision to remove royalty fees for collections, giving buyers the choice to pay royalties or not. This happened after the July launch of Sudoswap, a decentralized protocol that allows users to buy/sell NFTs through an Automated Market Maker (AMM) and bypass royalties.

The dark horse of NFT marketplaces: Bloctobay

Bloctobay is a marketplace built on the Flow (FLOW) blockchain. Although its trading volumes are not comparable to Ethereum’s, Flow has been known as the home of the NBA Topshot, arguably sparking NFT’s bull run in 2021. Since then, it has curated a beginner-friendly image for potential NFT adopters, becoming the main launching pad for licensed NFTs including CNN, OVO and MotoGP. While it originally started as a more centralized marketplace, Bloctobay has relaxed its strict restrictions over time, going so far as to allow NFTs to be transferred off-chain through wallets like MetaMask. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Magic Eden on Solana has surpassed Bloctobay in terms of trading volume since April.

Julia Ng

Julia leads Growth Marketing & PR at CoinGecko and is passionate about bringing more women into Web3. That said, she’s generally bad at timing the market, so she DCAs just in case. Follow the author on Twitter @ngxinyajulia