NFT Marketplaces Remain a Niche Phenomenon in Crypto

Starting from an estimated revenue of $3.7 billion worldwide in 2019, crypto exchanges, neobrokers and NFT marketplaces have experienced a boom in the past two pandemic years. Even though the latter saw a meteoric rise in traffic and user count in 2021, they will likely continue to only make up a small fraction of the total revenue generated for crypto trading companies as our chart based on models from our Statista Digital Market Outlook shows.

According to Statista analysts, income for cryptocurrency and NFT platforms, excluding dedicated Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Web3 and B2B platforms, will jump up to an estimated $71.5 billion in 2025. This translates to a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21 percent between now and 2025.

While the CAGR for NFT trading revenue alone will be 14 percent higher, it is still estimated to only amount to $6.9 billion or roughly ten percent of all crypto trading platform income by 2025. This difference in value will also likely affect global user penetration, with a projected adoption rate of 4.5 percent for cryptocurrencies and only around one percent for NFTs.

This comparatively low percentage might suggest that crypto trading will stay a specialist subject for years to come, but the amount of money shifted on exchanges like Binance and Coinbase or NFT marketplaces like Opensea or Rarible is staggering already. An analysis from financial-services consulting company Optimas suggests that the total revenue of said exchanges surpassed that of traditional stock exchanges like the NYSE and Nasdaq in 2021, with additional reporting by Bloomberg estimating that the biggest crypto exchange platforms generate a revenue of up to $3 million per day for themselves this past year.

As is often the case with high-stakes financial speculation, most of the available cryptocurrency generating said revenue is concentrated among a small percentage of wallets. For example, two percent of all entities likely control 72 percent of all currently minted Bitcoin, as an analysis by Glassnode suggests.

Some of the main revenue streams for exchanges and marketplaces are transaction fees, so-called gas fees, conversion fees applicable when exchanging tokens like Bitcoin or Ethereum for U.S. dollars or other fiat currencies, as well as listing fees payable by the creators of the corresponding tokens, which can range from $2 million to $15 million per token according to fintech development company Soft-X.