NFT Debrief - April 2023

GM! Welcome to our monthly coverage of NFTs and the metaverse. This month:

• Ethereum dominated NFT market volume in March, while BNB and Arbitrum climbed up the ranks to overtake Immutable X and Flow

• Azuki continues expanding its IP, targeting the Asian Market in a new partnership between BEANZ and IPX

• We highlight the newly launched OpenSea Pro and its impressive performance right out of the gate

🚨State of the Market

In March, there was a slight decrease in NFT volume on Ethereum. However, it remained above $1 billion, a level not seen since June of the previous year. The majority of the NFT volume in March was dominated by Blur, which accounted for 72% of the total volume, surpassing OpenSea’s 20% share. Blur’s Season 2 token incentives program, which encourages bidding and listing, will extend its 2x multiplier for an additional month and end on May 1st, 2023. The marketplace is also teasing a significant announcement on the same day. Although Blur has the highest trading volume, OpenSea is still ahead in terms of unique active wallets.

Other notable developments:

• OpenSea debuts OpenSea Pro, a commission-free Pro NFT platform that caters to professional NFT traders. Previously known as Gem, OpenSea Pro’s rebrand will tie the NFT aggregator closer to OpenSea. OpenSea Pro also plans to feature NFTs as rewards for active users on the platform. We cover OpenSea Pro in our Monthly Highlights section further down.

• Magic Eden launched the Bitcoin Launchpad on April 7th, 2023, allowing creators to launch Ordinals directly on their platform. Users are able to mint, buy, and sell Bitcoin Ordinals directly on Magic Eden, making Bitcoin Ordinals more accessible to users through a seamless frontend UI. The platform also decided to launch a limited release in partnership with PGodjira, and more than 10 Ordinals launches were actively released throughout the month.

• Art Blocks debuts its own secondary NFT marketplace on its existing Art Blocks website, allowing art collectors to browse listed NFTs across all Art Blocks collections. The marketplace is platform agnostic, enabling it to be an Art Blocks secondary market aggregator. The new marketplace has no platform fees for secondary trades as well, and all artists’ specified creator royalties will be fully honored.

  

• Ethereum remains the most popular blockchain for NFTs in March, with $486M (72.8% of total volume) in total NFT sales volume settled over the last 30 days. Solana trails in second place with $96M (14.4% of total volume).

• NFT activity on BNB and Arbitrum continues to trend upwards, overtaking both Flow and Immutable X in March, despite the trading incentives on Immutable X that reward users with IMX tokens for completing trades on the platform.

• NFTPerp is a decentralized exchange that offers perpetual futures trading for NFT collections. On November 25th, 2022, the platform introduced its beta on Arbitrum One, allowing traders to take long or short positions on NFTs with leverage of up to 5x. This feature allows small investors to get access to in-demand collections like BAYC or CryptoPunks despite their high floor prices, or short the NFTs to express a bearish view or to hedge against their NFT exposure.

• Daily active traders maintained above 200 through March, likely due to the platform’s Odeshi Airdrop, which is a retroactive airdrop campaign that rewards active users based on their trades and overall volume. Rewards are airdropped to eligible traders on a monthly basis in the form of vNFTP toke