OpenSea Polygon NFT sales top Ethereum

In January, OpenSea handled over 1.5 million NFTs sales on Ethereum sidechain Polygon, while Ethereum’s own mainnet tallied a little over 1.1 million sales via the same marketplace

More individual nonfungible tokens (NFTs) were sold on Polygon than Ethereum on leading marketplace OpenSea for the second straight month, as per public blockchain data curated via a Dune dashboard.

In January, OpenSea handled more than 1.5 million nonfungible token sales on Ethereum sidechain Polygon, while Ethereum’s own mainnet tallied a little more than 1.1 million sales via the same marketplace. That trend continues from December, when 1.3 million nonfungible tokens were sold on Polygon through OpenSea compared to just below 1 million Ethereum nonfungible tokens.

Ethereum has long been considered the premier blockchain for nonfungible tokens, and it hosts most of the high-value projects—despite its sometimes-high gas fees. But as Polygon continues to strike deals with large brands such as Meta, Starbucks, and Reddit, and as additional game projects tap the scaling network, the number of assets being traded on the sidechain continues to rise.

While the Ethereum merge lessened the mainnet’s energy consumption by 99.998 per cent, it did not resolve the issue of the gas fees charged by the network, which sometimes surpasses the base cost of the asset itself. A gas fee is a cost that the Ethereum network charges users to complete a transaction.

By contrast, the user transaction fees charged by Polygon and layer-1 Ethereum rivals such as Solana and Avalanche is exponentially low, and have in turn become known for hosting more affordable nonfungible token collections.

According to OpenSea, Donald Trump digital trading cards was the top Polygon nonfungible token collection in January overall, which saw around 5,500 sales across all Polygon marketplaces, tallying 1,743 ETH (nearly $2.8 million) in trading volume.

But Planet IX saw around 5 million sales over the last 30 days when it comes to Polygon collections with the highest number of sales across all marketplaces beyond just OpenSea. Sunflower Land came next with 1 million sales, Mocaverse tallied 42,000 sales, and Lympo Athletes saw nearly 37,000 sales in the past month.

It is worth noting that most of these sales are for low-cost assets meant for metaverse worlds or Web3 games. In some cases, such as with Sunflower Land and Planet IX, nonfungible token assets are selling for pennies’ worth of ETH, significantly bringing down the average sale price for Polygon-based nonfungible tokens during that period.

While Ethereum was surpassed by Polygon in the total number of sales, the overall trade value of Ethereum is still substantially more. On OpenSea, Ethereum saw nearly $446 million in total volume in January traded while Polygon NFT sales were worth $15.4 million. With nearly 1.5 million nonfungible token sales on Polygon, the average sale price comes at around $10.

It should be noted that this is not the first time that the total number of monthly Polygon nonfungible token sales has topped Ethereum. There was a similar spike in late 2021 and early 2022, but then the number of Polygon sales dropped sharply until the recent rebound, Dune shows.

The costliest and most desirable nonfungible tokens (such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club) still live on Ethereum, which is driving considerably more trading volume compared to Polygon. But the sidechain network is seeing traction as a destination for gaming nonfungible tokens and low-cost collectibles—which could assist in wider nonfungible token adoption by reaching a much bigger audience.