Magic Eden, a Solana-based nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace, recorded its largest monthly trading volume in March, surpassing industry leader Blur.

Its NFT trading volume spiked 194.4% in March to $756.5 million, while Blur marginally increased to $530.4 million, according to CoinGecko’s Q1 2024 report, published on April 17.

CoinGecko said Magic Eden’s rise up the ranks was partly contributed by its new Diamond reward program and its continued partnership with Yuga Labs — at a time when the NFT studio cut ties with NFT marketplaces that weren’t supporting creator royalties.

It marked the sixth consecutive month that Magic Eden increased its trading volume.

March marked the first month Blur had been unseated as the leading NFT marketplace by trading volume since OKX’s NFT marketplace capitalized on a Bitcoin Ordinals craze last December. Prior to that, Blur led trading volumes for 10 straight months after it surpassed OpenSea in February 2023.

However, OKX has lost a large share of Bitcoin NFT trading volume since then to the likes of Magic Eden and UniSat, and as a result, its trading volume has tanked 73.3% since December to $180 million.

Despite this, OKX still managed to rake in the third-largest NFT trading volume in Q1 2024, with Solana-based Tensor and OpenSea rounding out the top five.

Meanwhile, NFT trading volumes across the top 10 marketplaces amounted to $4.7 billion in Q1 2024 — a 51.6% increase from Q4 2023.

Despite the rise, the floor prices of top NFT collectibles such as Bored Ape Yacht Clubs and CryptoPunks have plummeted more than 91% and 64%, respectively since reaching peaks in May 2022 and October 2021.

The enforcement of creator royalties has been a major issue between NFT marketplaces and studios of late.

OpenSea, once the leading NFT marketplace, controversially sunset its on-chain royalty enforcement tool last August. Its CEO, Devin Finzer, said the tool hadn’t had the success it hoped and claimed its competitors, such as Blur, Dew and LooksRare, were circumventing it by integrating the Seaport Protocol to bypass OpenSea’s blacklist and therefore avoid creator fees.

But OpenSea partially backtracked on this position earlier this month, enabling support for an ERC-721C programmable earnings standard.

Source : Cointelegraph by Brayden Lindrea / Apr 18, 2024