- OpenSea’s daily trading volume dropped from over $322 million on August 29 to around $80 million by September 8.
- Daily transactions on OpenSea have cooled down as well, dropping by over 30%.
- However, there is still a lot of attention on the growing NFT space.
Starting early August, it was evident that the hype around NFTs is resuscitating at an unprecedented rate. The NFT bubble saw OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace by volume, process over $3 billion worth of transactions in the month of August alone.
On August 29, OpenSea processed over $322 million in one single day. In comparison, the marketplace processed just north of $20 million for the entirety of 2020. However, with each passing day, OpenSea’s daily volume continues to decline sharply.
On September 7, OpenSea processed just over $100 million. By yesterday, September 8, that figure sank to around $84 million, a 16% drop in just one day. And compared to its peak during August, yesterday represented a decline of over 74% in OpenSea’s trading volume.
In addition, daily transactions on OpenSea have plummeted as well. Approximately 80,000 transactions were taking place on OpenSea at its peak during late August. Though, that number has dropped to less than 55,000 by now.
While this does not necessarily mean that the NFT bubble has burst, it can be an indication that the market was extremely overhyped and needed some correction.
It is worth mentioning that there is still a lot of attention on the space, as Loot and its derivatives took over Twitter during the weekend. Furthermore, as the ETH price goes up and the network gets congested, some of the activity is spilling over to Solana’s fledgling NFT ecosystem.
During the latest days of August, numerous types of NFTs, including Bored Apes, Ether Rocks, and CryptoPunks saw exceptional interest by users, resulting in a massive uptick in volumes. Erick Calderon, CEO at Art Blocks, even reported that their squiggle NFTs are selling out at lightning-fast speed. “Now every time we release something it feels like this drop because it just sells out instantly,” Calderon said.
OpenSea Bug Burns $100,000 Worth of NFTs
OpenSea has accidentally burned $100,000 worth of digital arts after being plagued by a bug. The bug, which was fixed following a report by an affected user, has destroyed at least 42 NFTs.
Nick Johnson, founder and lead developer at Ethereum Name Service (ENS), first reported the bug after being affected by it. Johnson said when he transferred an ENS name, dubbed “rilxxlir.eth” which is the first ENS name registered, it went to a burn address. A burn address has no private key corresponding to it, therefore anything transferred to it becomes obsolete.
“A frantic call to OpenSea later, it transpires I was the first and apparently only victim of a bug introduced to their transfer page in the past 24 hours, which affected all ERC721 transfers to ENS names. Ownership of rilxxlir.eth is now permanently burned,” Johnson tweeted.
While Johnson was the first one publicly reporting the bug, he wasn’t the only one affected. It turns out that at least 32 transactions were plagued by the bug, which involved a total of 42 NFTs. The majority of the destroyed non-fungible tokens were ERC-721 transfers, while a limited number were ERC-1155 transfers. Altogether, the burnt NFTs are speculated to be valued at $100,000, at least.
