NFT sales went from $250 million in 2020 to just over $44 billion in 2021, representing a massive 164x increase. With weekly NFT sales ranging between $10–$20 million, even in the bear market, a tag-along industry of artists, writers, and coders emerged to facilitate the demand for new blockchain assets.
As things stand between the primary and secondary markets, they are largely equally distributed. Meaning, there are as many resellers as there are initial buyers from NFT drops.
Freelancers Have Equally Consistent NFT Profits
According to a Chainalysis report from December 2021, selling NFTs from the primary market resulted in a profit for only 28.5% of traders, using the data from the largest NFT marketplace OpenSea. In contrast, flipping NFTs from the secondary market resulted in profits 65.1% of the time.
It is then quite congruous that this percentage matches almost perfectly with the number of freelancers profiting from NFT services. Fiverr, the largest gig-economy platform with an average 50 million monthly transactions, revealed that 64% of U.S. freelancers profit from NFT-related gigs.
Of course, these gigs include ideation, artwork, tutorials, marketing, and even coding for generative NFT collections revolving around attribute rarity. To demonstrate the demand for these services, one only has to look at Fiverr growth, from Q3 to Q4 of 2021, they increased by 278%.
What About the Web3 Market as a Whole?
As you may have noticed, NFTs are becoming an integral part of web3, the new infrastructure of the internet that is more centralized. In reality, this means greater control of privacy and users’ assets than simply relying on a couple of behemoth corporations for their mercy.
Simply put, if you have a MetaMask wallet, and you have already connected it to a DApp, either NFT marketplace or a DeFi lending protocol like Aave, you have already participated in web3. A big part of this new ecosystem is metaverse platforms, such as Decentraland or The Sandbox, which themselves are composed of NFTs as virtual land.
Interestingly, freelance profit-taking from metaverse-related services is significantly lesser, at 48%. However, of the 1,000 freelancers surveyed, the overwhelming majority, at 84%, plans to further tweak their gig offering for the expected NFT/metaverse growth. Over half view, they can make between $2,600 and $5,200 per month extra for monetizing their blockchain skills.
In the end, freelancer supply will have to meet the demand. Over 50% of NFT sales are under $200. At the same time, weekly NFT sales have yet to break the 400k threshold in 2022, largely remaining in the range between 300k–100k. This will depend on how long the current bearish crypto/stock market period is going to carry on.
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