Polygon, a sidechain of Ethereum, recently achieved a milestone, surpassing ‘Ethereum Killer’ Solana to become the No. 2 chain in NFT sales volume in the past month. According to CryptoSlam, an NFT statistics website, Polygon amassed $34 million in total NFT sales compared to Solana’s $33 million.
While the numbers still pale in comparison to Ethereum’s $247.9 million in sales for the same period, they show that the Polygon NFT market has continued to grow. A quick toggle to the all-time blockchain statistics on CryptoSlam shows that Polygon is ranked 5th, indicating that its performance this month is better than usual.
Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of Polygon, noted on X (formerly ‘Twitter’) that the many of the sales are from micro-transactions, which is the dream of the crypto community. He said that the numbers on CryptoSlam show that there is still a lot of wash trading on Polygon, though that this does not take away from the sidechain’s accomplishment.
.@0xPolygon NFT ecosystem, for the first time, across a 30D period gets on the second rank in terms of traded volume.
Few other observations:
1. This is when a lot of Polygon NFT volumes are done by games etc which process payments via Credit Cards etc but only transfer NFTs… pic.twitter.com/eJk1o78q87— Sandeep Nailwal | sandeep. polygon 💜 (@sandeepnailwal) August 15, 2023
Polygon is known as the blockchain that hosts Web3 games. Due to its low transaction fees and economic impact, it is the choice for games that require users to make many transactions. In addition, it has become the Web3 home for major Web2 companies, hosting collections by Coca-Cola and Starbucks, among others.
Top 10 Polygon NFT Collections = 65% of Sales Volume
A quick look at the top 10 NFT collections on Polygon in the past month shows a variety of sets, some of which have a gaming focus and at least one other a PFP focus. Check out the image below:
The top dog in the Polygon space appears to be DraftKings, which is a betting and fantasy sports platform. By itself, it did over 30% of the sales volume over the past month, even besting Dust Labs’ much hyped y00ts collection, which moved to Polygon months ago.
After DraftKings and y00ts, the sales volume slows to below $1 million per collection, although the number of transactions varies considerably. For instance, the third and fourth best collections had 180 and 160 transactions respectively, but the fifth (ACTIVATOR) had 2,166. Overall, four collections had increases in the number of transactions, while five fell (one remained even).
With y00ts moving to Ethereum, that will no doubt take away from some of the volume on the sidechain, but, truly, not much. Y00ts accounted for just $3.4 million in volume, which, if removed, would only drop Polygon to 3rd in total sales volumes. Behind Solana to be sure, but still well ahead of the fourth best blockchain for NFTs.
Polygon, as we have covered, continues to grow each month, and Rarity Sniper will be here to report back with any new stories involving the sidechain.