Magic Eden surpasses market leader Blur in NFT trading volume

Magic Eden, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) running on the Solana network, recorded its largest ever monthly trading volume in March. With a 194.4% increase, volume rose to $756.5 million, beating Blur, the former market leader, which recorded marginally higher volume of $530.4 million. This data comes from CoinGecko’s Q1 2024 report, published on April 17.

Diamond reward program contributes to growth

This remarkable growth of Magic Eden is partly attributed to the new Diamond rewards program and the continued partnership with Yuga Labs, especially now that Yuga Labs has decided to to break ties with NFT marketplaces not supporting creator royalties.

This was the sixth consecutive month that Magic Eden saw its trading volume increase, and March marked the first time Blur was supplanted as the leading NFT marketplace by volume since the height of the Bitcoin Ordinals craze in December on OKX’s NFT marketplace.

OKX, which historically captured much of the Bitcoin NFT trading volume, has seen a 73.3% drop in its trading volume since December, which now stands at $180 million. Despite this decline, OKX still ranks third on the list of NFT marketplaces with the largest trading volume in the first quarter of 2024, behind Solana-based Tensor and OpenSea, which round out the top five.

Increase of more than 51%

Overall, NFT trading volumes on the top 10 marketplaces reached $4.7 billion in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 51.6% compared to the last quarter of 2023.

Despite the growth in trading volumes, the bottom prices of prominent NFT collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Clubs and CryptoPunks have fallen significantly since their peaks in May 2022 and October 2021, respectively, with declines of more than 91% and 64%.

Enforcing creator royalties remains a major point of contention between NFT marketplaces and studios. OpenSea, which once held the leading position, controversially discontinued its on-chain royalty enforcement tool last August. CEO Devin Finzer admitted that the tool had not brought the expected success and accused competitors of circumventing it. Earlier this month, however, OpenSea made a partial about-face by adding support for a programmable ERC-721C earning standard.