Continued from Part 1.
In a snapshot from June of the top categories traded, virtual world projects (such as Decentraland, CryptoVoxels, the Sandbox, and Somnium Space) were the highest volume projects on OpenSea, followed by art and digital trading cards. June NFT trading volume in USD by category (source):
Diving deeper into a specific virtual world project, we looked at CryptoVoxels. CryptoVoxels users purchase virtual land (called parcels) to create NFT art museums, shops, and recreational areas. Since CryptoVoxels started as a single developer in mid-2018, both trading volume and the average price of CryptoVoxels parcels has grown steadily over time. The developer has put the ETH earned from parcel sales and secondary trading fees back into expansion and development of the world. CryptoVoxels average price and volume over time on OpenSea (source):
The number of developers experimenting with NFTs has grown dramatically since CryptoKitties pioneered the ERC721 standard in late 2017. The following chart shows the number of ERC721 / ERC1155 contracts deployed on Ethereum. The ERC1155 (the purple bar), which allows developers to create groups of "semi-fungible assets", is the newer standard on the block and has recently grown in popularity. (Source)
NFT adoption is early but growing steadily as the infrastructure around NFTs improve, new NFT projects come online, and the barriers to entry to using NFTs go down. As of July, over 20,000 users have traded on OpenSea, 2.5x growth since July 2019 (source).