NFT Market Aggregators: How popular are they and what is their significance to less popular marketplaces?

What are Aggregators?

NFT market aggregators are platforms that allow users to browse and discover NFTs from multiple different marketplaces. These aggregators consolidate listings of NFTs from marketplaces, making it easier for users to find and purchase NFTs and saving time and effort for users from comparing the listings across multiple different marketplaces. 

Aggregators also allow traders to batch buy NFTs across collections and marketplaces in one single transaction, thus saving user’s time and gas fees if they are buying more than one NFTs. 

Aggregator Share in NFT Trading Volume 

Figure 1 – Market Share of Aggregator Trades in all NFT Trading Volume on Opensea, Looksrare and X2Y2 Since Genie.xyz launch (Wash Trading Filtered) Source: Footprint Analytics @Hanson502

The first ever NFT aggregator, Genie.xyz, was launched on 17th of November 2021. Figure 1 shows the volume share of aggregator trades in the NFT market after the first aggregator ‘Genie.xyz’ became live in November. The data includes Blur.io, Gem.xyz and Genie.xyz aggregators and Opensea, X2Y2 and LooksRare marketplaces. Wash trading transactions are filtered. 

As we can see from Figure 1, aggregators make up 4.49% of the NFT volume. This indicates that aggregators are not really widely used among NFT buyers, even though it has better functions than marketplaces. If we include wash trading transactions as shown in Figure 2, aggregators only make up 2.3% of all volume on the marketplaces since Genie.xyz was launched. 

Figure 2 – Market Share of Aggregator Trades in all NFT Trading Volume on Opensea, Looksrare and X2Y2 Since Genie.xyz launch (Without Wash Trading Filtered) Source: Footprint Analytics @Hanson502

However, wash trading transactions are also spotted in trades through aggregators. 7.43% of the volume of aggregators are detected as wash trading transactions. Please keep in mind that when wash trading transactions are filtered in Figure 1, the wash trading transactions through aggregators were removed as well. 

Figure 3 – Wash Trading Volume  % of all Aggregator Transactions Source: Footprint Analytics @Hanson502 

Aggregator Usage in Marketplaces 

Figure 4 – Aggregator Volume % of all Opensea NFT transactions since Genie.xyz launch (Wash Trading Filtered) & Wash Trading % of all aggregator transactions of Opensea.  (Source: Footprint Analytics @Hanson502) 

In terms of volume, only 3.24% of NFT purchases on Opensea is transacted through aggregators. Being the most popular marketplace, Opensea does not need to rely on aggregators to increase their NFT listings exposure to NFT buyers. Almost all aggregators trades on Opensea are normal transactions, people are not using aggregators to wash trade on Opensea. 

Figure 5 – Aggregator Volume % of all LooksRare NFT transactions since Genie.xyz launch (Wash Trading Filtered) & Wash Trading % of all aggregator transactions of LooksRare.  (Source: Footprint Analytics @Hanson502) 

In terms of volume, 11.1% of NFT purchases on LooksRare is transacted through aggregators. Being the second popular marketplace, LooksRare relies more on aggregators than does Opensea. 

Figure 6 – Aggregator Volume % of all X2Y2 NFT transactions since Genie.xyz launch (Wash Trading Filtered) & Wash Trading % of all aggregator transactions of X2Y2.  (Source: Footprint Analytics @Hanson502) 

In terms of volume, 34.4% of NFT purchases on X2Y2 is transacted through aggregators, that is ⅓ of volume on X2Y2 after wash trading is filtered. Moreover, Figure 6 shows that 25% of aggregator volumes on X2Y2 are wash trading transactions. Wash traders are using aggregators to wash trade on X2Y2. 

Figure 7 – Trading statistics of all X2Y2 NFT transactions since Genie.xyz launch (Wash Trading Filtered)  (Source: Footprint Analytics @Hanson502) 

Looking at Figure 7, X2Y2 has more NFT transactions through aggregators than direct transactions on its marketplace. The average value per aggregator transaction on X2Y2 is way smaller than direct transactions. This is because NFT wash traders are trading low value NFTs repeatedly to create a false sense of volume and liquidity for NFT collections they launched, resulting in relatively low price transactions with high transaction frequencies. 

Takeaways

• The overall data of aggregators is telling us that they are not really widely used among NFT buyers
• Aggregator purchases make up a larger proportion of trading volume in less popular marketplaces than in popular marketplaces such as Opensea. 
• X2Y2 relies most on aggregators and people are also using aggregators to wash trade NFT collection transaction volumes on X2Y2. 

This piece is contributed by Footprint Analytics community.

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