OpenSea is a trading platform specifically for NFTs. With the meteoric rise of NFTs in the recent months, the activity on OpenSea increased exponentially, where it took over Uniswap as the most used platform on Ethereum's mainnet.
OpenSea generates income by taking a 2.5% share of the traded price of the NFTs, payable by the buyer or the seller. NFT creators on OpenSea are also able to generate a steady income stream when their NFTs are getting sold on a regular basis by setting a royalty fee.
Recently, OpenSea had expanded into Polygon, which brings up the question, is it able to replicate its success on Ethereum in Polygon? Let's find out.
As aforementioned, OpenSea's income mainly comes from the 2.5% fee generated from each token sale, so there must be an address to hold all the collected fees. So, to find out how OpenSea is doing on Polygon, we have to find out the wallet address and find out how much fees had been directed into the said wallet.
The search begins by going to OpenSea's website, https://opensea.io/, and search for NFTs that had been sold at least once (since the fees are generated on successful sales, the wallet address will only exist on NFTs with at least one sale history). The method to identify NFTs that had been sold at least once is shown below.
The red box indicates the previous sale value.
By looking at the NFT's trading history, we are able to find out sale transactions and subsequently get the details on polygonscan.
Based on the two transactions below, we are able to conclude that the contract is the same for different NFTs, therefore we only need to examine a single contract only, which simplifies things. Judging on this, the smart contract that orchestrates all the trading activity on Polygon's OpenSea is 0xf715beb51ec8f63317d66f491e37e7bb048fcc2d.
Using the transactions as references again, we are also able to find out that the coordinator address 0xf715beb51ec8f63317d66f491e37e7bb048fcc2d is also responsible for sending the collected fees and royalties to their intended destinations. Now, if every sale has a fee, it is logical to assume that the address that received the most deposits (by transaction count) from the coordinator address is OpenSea's fee collector address. With this in mind, the deposit counts from the coordinator address to each address for successful sales are found out. As expected, the result shows only one address that stands out from the rest, which is 0x5b3256965e7c3cf26e11fcaf296dfc8807c01073. Thus, we have found the fee collector address.
Now that we've found the fee collector address, we are able to differentiate between the collected fees and the royalties to the NFT creators and calculate them accordingly. But, before we begin, do note that there may be missing transactions as the data starts on June 28, where the data from OpenSea's website goes all the way back to March.
Based on the graphs, OpenSea's income on Polygon is growing exponentially from about $10,000 per day or about 5 ETHs per day to about $50,000 or 15 ETHs per day. That's a 5x increase in terms of USD and 3x increase in terms of ETH in less than two months. Without a doubt, OpenSea is performing outstandingly and cementing its role as THE marketplace for NFT trading.