Open Sea’s NFT volume down 50% after monumental surge in August

Following a colossal surge of $4B sales volume throughout the month of August for the leading non-fungible token, or NFT, marketplace OpenSea, recent figures indicate a metaphoric return to earth after a propulsion to the mighty heights of the moon.

NFT marketplaces have largely paralleled the bearish momentum witnessed across the cryptocurrency markets across the last week, as platforms, collections and floor prices all suffer corrections.

Analytical data from DappRadar reveals that over the last seven day period, sales volume on OpenSea has fallen sharply by almost 50% to $792.23M from a pool of 156,811 traders, 10% less than registered across the previous week.

Despite this short-term correction, OpenSea still holds a dominant position over its closest competitors Axie Infinity and CryptoPunks on the volume metric with $158.24M and $45.92M respectively.

Conscious to not skew the narrative bearish, it also must be reported that by utilizing the same dataset and expanding the scope across a 30-day period, it can be fairly assessed that OpenSea shows no signs of long-term decline with a positive volume figure of 336.94%.

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In a momentary mishap this week, a bug on the platform affecting ERC721 transfers to ENS names accidentally deleted a small number of users’ NFT assets totalling $100K. It is understood that the incident was swiftly resolved and funds returned.

Last week, the platform issued a guerrilla-styled recruitment post, declaring that they will generously donate 1 Ethereum (ETH) token to any member of the public who refers a potential engineer or designer to the firm and they progress to become a successful candidate.

In the statement, head of product Nate Chastain pleaded: “We are 37 people handling 98% of all NFT volume” and that the company has a “pressing need for manpower.”