This week our contributor analysts cover NFTs: OpenSea, Foundation, SuperRare, RMRK, and Fractional.

• OpenSea had a record August with $3.4B in gross merchandise volume (GMV)! OpenSea even did more volume than Etsy and most publicly traded marketplace companies. The NFT explosion the past month was driven by new avatar projects and generative art. OpenSea's search and discovery infrastructure, especially custom integrations for filtering a project's NFTs by attributes, made it the leading platform for buying NFTs.

• OpenSea earned $236M in fees in August. The fees included both the OpenSea marketplace fee (2.5% of GMV) and seller commission fees. Thus, the take rate for OpenSea was $85.6M in August, giving an annual run rate of $1.027B and a P/E ratio of 1.46!

• Whereas NFTs are great at onboarding mainstream users to crypto because they're fun and easy to understand, DeFi is more catered towards financial elites who understand trading vocabulary. A total of 240K unique wallets bought or sold at least one NFT on OpenSea in August.

• We hit a major milestone in August - Foundation eclipsed $100M in sales, less than seven months after our launch. Our fast growth is due largely to our engaged global community and our strong product which is enabling our creative economy to take off. Collector excitement is palpable as new talent continues to enter the Foundation network. Notably, generative artist Shvembldr has achieved over 1,400 ETH in sales since his first sale in late July.

• Our collector base is expanding at an accelerated rate, reaching over 13,700 unique bidders since February. More collectors are jumping on board to take advantage of the opportunity to build out collections that could define the future of culture across a wide spectrum of categories.

• Collectors continue to enjoy significant returns on the secondary market, with an average price appreciation of 329% across all secondaries. Notably, The Carpoolers collection by Alejandro Cartagena has generated 48.65 ETH in secondary volume and an average of 3.5x returns for collectors.

• SuperRare is the leading curated marketplace for 1/1 NFT art. In August, $14.8M was paid out to the 1,556 artists on the platform. $13.5M was the result of primary sales of the NFTs from artists to collectors. $1.3M was secondary sale royalties. Every time one collector sells an NFT to another, the original artist gets a 10% royalty cut of the transaction.

• Last month, SuperRare airdropped 150M $RARE tokens, 15% of the total supply, to the artists and collectors who have used the marketplace. This is the first step in their long-term plan to decentralize curation on the platform. The chart below details the distribution of the new token.

• On August 26th, trading volume on the platform hit $100M and today, that metric has grown to $122.5M. This year has been excellent for SuperRare. The top 10 highest sales on the platform all happened in 2021, the largest being the $1.7M sale of ‘Death Dip’ by XCopy to Punk4156.

• Fractional is building a permissionless and decentralized NFT fractionalization platform to enable greater ownership of the world’s most sought after NFTs. It allows you to split an NFT into some capped supply of ERC20 tokens (inside of a vault), and then list these tokens on some DEX pool to start a "live swap." Since its launch only a couple of months ago, Fractional has traded a total of $887M to date and over 23K unique collectors.

• The number of Fractional vaults has 4x’d in the past month, producing $400M in total trading volume, and with 25 vaults having implied valuations over $1M.

• Despite launching just a few months ago in July, Fractional already has ~1000 unique curators and ~1000 daily unique traders.