For the second consecutive month, OpenSea, a leading overall marketplace, sold more NFTs on Polygon than on Ethereum, according to blockchain data from the Dune dashboard.
In January, OpenSea processed over 1.5 million NFT sales on the Ethereum sidechain Polygon, while Ethereum’s mainnet had over 1.1 million sales through the same marketplace. This trend continues from December when around 1.3 million NFTs were sold on Polygon (a Blockchain platform) through OpenSea compared to nearly 1 million Ethereum NFTs.
Although Ethereum has been known as the top blockchain for NFTs, Polygon’s deals with big brands like Meta, Starbucks, and Reddit, and the increasing popularity of game projects on the scaling network, are leading more assets to be traded on the sidechain. Polygon and other layer-1 Ethereum competitors, such as Solana and Avalanche, offer significantly lower transaction fees than Ethereum and are becoming known for hosting more affordable NFT collections.
In January, the top Polygon NFT collection, according to OpenSea, was the Donald Trump digital trading cards, which had about 5,500 sales across all Polygon marketplaces, giving rise to a trading volume of 1,743 ETH (approximately $2.8 million). In terms of Polygon collections with the largest sales across all marketplaces beyond OpenSea, Planet IX had around 5 million sales in the past 30 days, Sunflower Land had 1 million, Mocaverse had 42,000, and Lympo Athletes had around 37,000 sales.Most of the sales are for low-cost assets used in metaverse worlds or Web3 games, and in some cases, NFT assets are selling for pennies’ worth of ETH, bringing down the average sale price for Polygon-based NFTs.
Although Polygon exceeded Ethereum in sales, Ethereum still saw substantially more value traded overall. On OpenSea, Ethereum had roughly $446 million in total volume traded in January, while Polygon NFT sales comprised just $15.4 million. With about 1.5 million NFT sales on Polygon, the average sale price was around $10. This isn’t the first time that the monthly Polygon NFT sales have surpassed Ethereum, as a similar trend was observed in late 2021 and early 2022, but then the number of Polygon sales decreased until recently rebounding.
The most valuable and desirable NFTs (such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club) still exist on Ethereum, driving significantly more trading volume than Polygon. However, Polygon is gaining traction as a destination for gaming NFTs and low-cost collectables, which could help to increase the adoption of NFTs by reaching a wider audience.
