Rapture #156: Volume Attributed to Active Users for NFT Marketplaces
Recently, I was thinking about how one could effectively map out the differences of the major NFT marketplaces. From a product perspective, there is little differentiation between them all. Some might have gasless minting, while others might have credit card transactions enabled, but these features are by no means innovatively different. If you are interested in seeing a feature comparison of the major NFT marketplaces, you can check out the Ethereum NFT marketplace feature board and this NFT platforms google sheet.
Yet when I started digging into some of the data, I was able to get a clearer picture of the some of the characteristics that define the users of these marketplaces.
OpenSea
One metric that gives insight into roughly how wealthy the users are on a marketplace is taking the monthly volume and dividing it by the monthly active user, which gets you a monthly volume per active user metric.
Looking at February's numbers, OpenSea's monthly volume per user stood at approximately $6,804. $6,804 of volume being attributed to an active user means that OpenSea's users on average are either quite wealthy (i.e. they are willing to spend in the thousands per month on average on NFTs) or they are incredibly active (i.e. they buy and trade multiple NFTs per month). I posit the wealth factor plays a larger role in the number being high rather than the average user actively buying/selling NFTs consecutively.
Rarible and LooksRare
Rarible's monthly volume per user stood at around $175, which is significantly lower than OpenSea's. In fact, OpenSea's monthly volume per user is more than 38x of Rarible's.
While DuneAnalytics does not have monthly break out of users or volume for LooksRare, latest NFT marketplace to come to market has only been around since January so I just took their total volume and divided it by total users. LooksRare's volume per user is an absurdly high $400,000. Without a doubt, this number is being driven by the fact that users are currently farming the LOOKs token by submitting a plethora of transactions on the marketplace, which of course drives up the volume numbers.
Similar to LooksRare, SuperRare has an absurdly high $ volume per user. For the month of February, $26,688 worth of volume could be attributed to each collector. This number being so high actually makes sense in the context of SuperRare, since SuperRare positions itself as a luxury marketplace, curating the NFTs available for sale.
Takeaway
While these numbers are not perfect, especially since "collector"/"active user" are not defined on the Dune Analytics' queries and thus may not be an apples to apples comparison, they do give a rough idea of how the userbases between the marketplaces are differentiated.
OpenSea's userbase tends to spend more or more actively transacts compared to Rarible's, and LooksRare's userbase clearly transacts far more often than the other marketplaces.
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