In March, Magic Eden passed the blur as the leader of the NFT marketplace: CoinGecko
Magic Eden, a Solana-based nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace, recorded its largest monthly trading volume in March, surpassing industry leader Blur.
NFT trading volume rose 194.4 percent to $756.5 million in March, while liquidity rose slightly to $530.4 million, according to CoinGecko's Q1 2024 report published on April 17.
CoinGecko's rise to Magic Eden's rank is partly due to its new Diamond Rewards program and its continued partnership with Yuga Labs — a time when NFT Studio has cut ties with NFT marketplaces that don't support creator royalties.
This is the sixth month in a row that Magic Eden has increased its trading volume.
OKX's NFT marketplace marked the first month in March that Blur was not positioned as the leading NFT marketplace by trading volume since it made it big on the Bitcoin Ordinals craze last December. Prior to that, Blur led trading volumes for 10 consecutive months after surpassing OpenSea in February 2023.
However, OKX has since lost its high Bitcoin NFT trading volume to the likes of Magic Eden and UniSat, resulting in a 73.3% drop in trading volume since December to $180 million.
Despite this, OKX still managed to achieve the third largest NFT trading volume in Q1 2024, with Solana-based Tensor and OpenSea rounding out the top five.
Meanwhile, NFT trading volume in the top 10 marketplaces reached $4.7 billion.
Despite the highs, the floor prices of major NFT aggregators such as Bored Up Yacht Clubs and Cryptopunks have fallen over 91% and 64% since their peaks in May 2022 and October 2021, respectively.
Related: 5 Ways to Monetize Your Digital Art with NFTs
Implementing creator royalties has been a long-standing issue among NFT marketplaces and studios.
OpenSea, once the leading NFT marketplace, controversially ditched its on-chain royalty enforcement tool last August. The company's CEO, Devin Finzer, said the tool has not had the success it had hoped for, and that competitors such as Blur, Dew and LooksRare are integrating the Seaport protocol to bypass OpenSea's blacklist and thus avoid creator fees.
But OpenSea partially backtracked on this position earlier this month, allowing entry-level support for programmable ERC-721C.
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