OurNetwork #119

Apr 29, 2022

About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.

New Research Alert: Yesterday our team at Variant published a full report on the state of the Ownership Economy, click here to read it.

Network Coverage
Coverage on the Polygon ecosystem.

① Polygon

From a user perspective, Polygon continues to have incredible adoption with 1.05m active addresses last week. Top performing dApps are split evenly between DeFi and gaming. Last month's most popular dApps include QuickSwap (209k), Pegaxy (170k), Sunflower Farmers (148k), and Crazy Defense Heroes (143k).

After pushing bot suppression efforts, transactions on Polygon have increased 5 of the last 6 weeks (2.8m to 3.2m transactions/day). Seven dApps have broken the 1m transactions per month milestone, including OpenSea (4m), Pegaxy (3.7m) Aavegotchi (2.1m), Arc8 (2m), QuickSwap (1.8m).

Finally, from a monetization perspective, Polygon network revenues have increased seven consecutive weeks, from $48k to $70k per day. Revenue increase has been driven by increased gas usage (+39%), while cost per gas has increased +7.8%.

We have witnessed a colossal growth of Polygon’s Gaming ecosystem in the past year, from our oldest dApps – Aavegotchi & Decentral Games – reaching new heights every day to upcoming labels such as Sunflower Land & Bloktopia choosing us. In Jan 22, Top 5 gaming dApps (Arc8, Sunflower Land, Crazy Defense Heroes, Pegaxy, & Aavegotchi) had a cumulative unique user count of 808k with a total of 18.1m transactions, making it the most successful month so far.

P2E has gained significant momentum over time, with Arc8 & Crazy Defense Heroes leading the way. These two and Pegaxy make up 17% of the network’s April user base. Due to Polygon's scalability, users can do multiple txs while still making P2E profitable. Weekly, games on-chain record ~20 txs/user.

14 of the 15 top collections on Polygon OpenSea are gaming NFTs. With such a stronghold on the sector, Polygon is committed to being the de facto chain for gaming and NFTs. Special initiatives such as Polygon Studios, indiGG, and significant hiring from the AAA gaming space further strengthen its commitment.

OpenSea is the leading platform for discovering and trading NFTs. $296m in trading volume has taken place on OpenSea’s Polygon market. January was the all-time high for trading on the Polygon marketplace, with $79m in volume.

Since launch, 1.2m wallets have bought or sold an NFT on OpenSea’s Polygon marketplace. The top collections by all-time trading volume are Zed Run (47k ETH), MyCryptoHeroes (27k ETH) and Decentral Games (11.5k ETH).

In April, 87% of the transactions on the OpenSea Polygon marketplace had a dollar value of $100 or less. Polygon’s low gas fees and approachable NFT prices make it an accessible platform for onboarding users to the NFT space.