Cointelegraph Consulting: Hype for NFTs is real, but what about transaction volume?

Covalent’s latest findings in Cointelegraph Consulting’s biweekly newsletter indicate that the nonfungible token, or NFT, market has whales of its own.

The largest user on OpenSea makes up $192 million in reserve capital, while the other users in the top 20% by value transacted only account for $8 million. Similarly, Rarible has a whale with $311 million in their wallet, and the other top 20% of active users collectively have $9.2 million. 

OpenSea describes itself as the largest NFT marketplace. Indeed, the platform is the market leader with over $153 million in NFT transactions facilitated across 97,072 different transfers since the beginning of 2021. Its major competitor, Rarible, is a not-so-close second with $33,794,800 in NFT transactions across 37,630 transfers since the beginning of 2021. 

Cointelegraph Consulting’s biweekly roundup breaks down the trends in institutional demand for digital assets and capital allocation over the past two weeks. More than $750 million was raised across the top five financing rounds in two weeks, with Blockchain.com having the third-largest capital raise in the blockchain industry. Notably, NFT marketplace OpenSea closed a $23 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz amid the NFT mania. 

We also congratulate our partner, Covalent, on closing a strategic funding round led by industry heavyweights Hashed VC, Binance Labs, Coinbase Ventures and Delphi Digital. 

As for the other hot trends, the race for registering a Bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund is in full swing with three more companies filing rule change applications with the United States Securities and Exchange Administration. Fidelity Investments, SkyBridge Capital and WisdomTree are following the attempts of VanEck and Valkyrie Digital Assets to list a regulated Bitcoin ETF.

Morgan Stanley became the first big U.S. bank to offer its institutional clients access to Bitcoin funds. The move encourages fierce competition among fund providers. In response, NYDIG reduced its access fee to 0.3%, more than six times lower than its closest competitor, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.

Read the full newsletter here for more news and signals, complete with detailed charts and images. 

We also review the industry’s most important news, including mergers and acquisitions, changes in the regulatory landscape, and enterprise blockchain integrations. Sign up now to be the first to receive these insights. All past editions of Market Insights are also available on Cointelegraph.com.

Cointelegraph’s Market Insights Newsletter shares our knowledge on the fundamentals that move the digital asset market. With market intelligence from one of the industry’s leading analytics providers, Covalent, the newsletter dives into the latest data on social media sentiment, on-chain metrics and derivatives.