NFT sales hit $1B for the year — already dwarfing 2020

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.

🔥🔥The #NFT space just hit $1 BILLION transferred in 2021!!🔥🔥

In the same period, last year, $11 million were transferred.

(this includes sales, and all interactions with NFT assets like breeding, upgrading,…)#nft #nonfungible #ethereum #market #1billion pic.twitter.com/eqU3ih724F

— NonFungible.com (@nonfungibles) March 3, 2021

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.