OpenSea Launches On BNB Chain

As the nascent NFT field struggles with low trading volumes, the leading marketplace is expanding onto new blockchains.

OpenSea, which processed over $5M of daily volume in November, launched on Binance’s BNB Chain on Nov. 29. This means that users will be able to trade BNB-native NFTs on OpenSea.

BNB Chain doesn’t sport quite the robust NFT ecosystem of Ethereum, which has flagship projects like Bored Apes Yacht Club accounting for $28.7M in volume over the last 30 days, according to analytics provider Nansen.

BNB Chain has generated at least $3M of NFT volume per week over the past year, but the vast majority of that volume comes from mints, rather than trading.

Weekly NFT Volume on BNB Chain

Multichain Strategy

With the integration of BNB Chain, OpenSea continues to pursue a multichain strategy. The marketplace launched on Avalanche, another Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible blockchain, in October, and already supports Solana, Polygon, Klaytn, and Ethereum Layer 2s.

Despite a consistent downtrend in volume since May, OpenSea still generated $318M of volume in October, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard. The marketplace takes a 2.5% cut of all sales, which would put its October revenue at $8M.

Using data from Nansen, taking 2.5% of the volume on the top 10 NFT projects on BNB Chain over the past 30 days would have netted OpenSea roughly an additional $185,000.

Overall, the BNB token has outperformed in relative terms, dropping 6.6% in the last 30 days while ETH and BTC have both seen drops of over 17% in that span, according to The Defiant Terminal.