February was a record-breaking month for the NFT sector, with its top three earners together racking up over $340 million in sales.
To put it into context, that’s a 400% increase over January and — even more significantly — massively outstrips the $200 million in NFT sales over the whole of 2020.
In fact, NFT trackers NonFungible calculated crypto art sales have already clocked $1 billion this year.
According to the most recent monthly report from DappRadar:
- NBA TopShot was the top NFT marketplace in February with $226 million in sales.
- Second was Ethereum’s CryptoPunks, which smashed its monthly revenue records with $79 million.
- Permissionless marketplace OpenSea came third with about $70 million.
The floor price of CryptoPunks also saw a major spike. DappRadar found the cheapest price for any CryptoPunk had risen from $10,000 to over $40,000.
NFTs in the mainstream zeitgeist
Canadian musician Grimes just became a NFT millionaire when her first ever digital art collection netted more than $5 million in 20 minutes.
Not to mention, world-leading auction house Christie’s opened bidding for its first sale of a fully digital artwork last month — a Beeple piece called Everydays: The First 5000 Days.
[Read more: Christie’s pegged a Beeple NFT at $200 — but bidders say over $2M]
The highest bid currently stands at $3.5 million with one week left to go.