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NFTs Over DeFi: OpenSea Just Overtook Uniswap on Ethereum Usage
Since last year, Uniswap has usually commanded the top spot.
Updated Sep 14, 2021, 1:37 p.m. Published Aug 9, 2021, 8:31 p.m.
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Non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace OpenSea topped the leaderboard in gas consumption on the Ethereum blockchain over the past 24 hours in a rare finish ahead of the decentralized finance (DeFi) exchange Uniswap.
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Since last year, Uniswap – the largest decentralized exchange on Ethereum – has typically commanded the most in daily transaction fees, a key barometer for actual usage of the world’s second-largest blockchain.
The resurgence of NFTs from highs earlier this year, however, has helped put OpenSea in the top spot with over $1.9 million in gas spent on transaction fees in the past day. By comparison, a combined $1.57 million in transaction fees has been spent on Uniswap V2 and V3.
Top-10 ETH burners race looks like the following #EIP1559 https://t.co/GgXY57GYJ5 @DuneAnalytics pic.twitter.com/iLUMoWOGyE
— Anton Bukov 🦇🔊 (@k06a) August 9, 2021
A slew of NFT projects have been launched in recent weeks, such as Pudgy Penguins, Sad Frogs District and Space Poggers. The projects host different types of auctions that allow users to mint a random NFT for a given amount of ether, the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain.
OpenSea is a secondary marketplace for these NFTs to be bid on and traded. Last month, the marketplace raised $100 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Data site Glassnode projects that OpenSea could have $1 billion in volume this month with 300,000 unique users.
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Pudgy Penguins is building a multi-vertical consumer IP platform — combining phygital products, games, NFTs and PENGU to monetize culture at scale.
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Pudgy Penguins is emerging as one of the strongest NFT-native brands of this cycle, shifting from speculative “digital luxury goods” into a multi-vertical consumer IP platform. Its strategy is to acquire users through mainstream channels first; toys, retail partnerships and viral media, then onboard them into Web3 through games, NFTs and the PENGU token.
The ecosystem now spans phygital products (> $13M retail sales and >1M units sold), games and experiences (Pudgy Party surpassed 500k downloads in two weeks), and a widely distributed token (airdropped to 6M+ wallets). While the market is currently pricing Pudgy at a premium relative to traditional IP peers, sustained success depends on execution across retail expansion, gaming adoption and deeper token utility.
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MegaETH mainnet to go live Feb. 9 in major test of ‘real-time’ Ethereum scaling
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- MegaETH, the much-watched high-performance Ethereum layer-2 network, announced that its public mainnet will go live Feb. 9, marking a major milestone for a project that has gained a lot of attention in the scaling landscape.
- MegaETH positions itself as a “real-time” blockchain for Ethereum, designed to deliver ultra-low latency and massive transaction throughput.
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