The number of NFT Art Whale Collectors

This week I set out to investigate how many whale collectors there are in the NFT art space. Here is what I found 👇

Based on a community poll, I set the benchmark for a collector to attain whale status at $100k+ spend.

In this thread, we'll look at the whale population of 4 popular platforms, then finish off with the total unique whales across those platforms.

1.OpenSea

Whale Population 🐳: 740

Collectors who are Whales 🎣: 0.7%

Whale spend / Total sales 🪙: 46%

Median purchase count 🛍️: 40

Median total spend 💰: $174,643.93

2. Foundation

Whale Population 🐳: 39

Collectors who are Whales 🎣: 0.7%

Whale spend / Total sales 🪙: 56%

Median purchase count 🛍️: 52

Median total spend 💰: $207,626.01

3. Rarible

Whale Population 🐳: 131

Collectors who are Whales 🎣: 0.3%

Whale spend / Total sales 🪙: 21%

Median purchase count 🛍️: 27

Median total spend 💰: $150,613.57

4. SuperRare
Whale Population 🐳: 122

Collectors who are Whales 🎣: 4%

Whale spend / Total sales 🪙: 73%

Median purchase count 🛍️: 27

Median total spend 💰: $228,431.77

I aggregated the spending of each collector across all 4 platforms. 155 collectors didn't have 100k+ spend on any one platform but achieved that benchmark when all purchases were combined. 79 collectors had 100k+ spend on multiple platforms. Here is the aggregated data 👇

5. The Pod
Whale Population 🐳: 1061

Collectors who are Whales 🎣: 0.8%

Whale spend / Total Sales 🪙: 48%

Median purchase count 🛍️: 47

Median total spend 💰: $376,678.45

Of course, this analysis leaves out many big platforms such as MakersPlace, KnownOrigin and Zora. Still, the data can serve as an indicator for the size of the whale collector population in the NFT art space as a proportion of total collectors.

Also, since I analyzed 4 of the most popular art marketplaces, one could assume that many of the whales from this pod will be the same whales present on other platforms.

Today, we only looked at Ethereum based platforms, but I plan to do the same for Tezos soon.

Disclaimers
(1) The USD value of purchases is based on the USD exchange rate for the cryptocurrency used for the purchase at the time of purchase.

(2) The whale count is based on unique wallets. One whale could be making $100k+ purchases from many wallets, thereby inflating the count. However, I don't think there will be many cases of this. From what I've seen, whales with many wallets usually use one for most of their purchases and one as a vault

(3) Instances of wash trading and price manipulation mean that there are some fake whales in the mix inflating the count.

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Article of the week

Introducing Auction House — Mirror

In recent months, NFTs have gone through a moment of cultural zeitgeist, commanding the attention and adoption of creators and communities all over the internet. Still in its infancy, the NFT ecosystem is mostly dominated by a small number of closed marketplaces—crypto middlemen and web3 gatekeepers…

^Zora's Auction House protocol is one to watch. Look at it this way: an improved OpenSea whitelabel with 0 fees and compatible DAOs. It was used for last week's historic Doge NFT sale where the original Doge image was sold by the photographer and Doge owner for charity at a whopping 1696.9ETH.

Credit: @ourZora