Creators & users sell NFTs on OpenSea. They receive royalties from secondary sales (supply-side fees).

OpenSea is a non-custodial NFT marketplace protocol built on Ethereum. OpenSea was founded by Alex Atallah & Devin Finzer and launched in 2017.

OpenSea team & investors own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by buyers (revenue). OpenSea's investors include a16z, Coatue, Founders Fund, etc.

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OpenSea

# OpenSea Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

OpenSea earnings represents the net profit from NFT marketplace operations, calculated as protocol fees (revenue) minus token incentives (expenses). This metric measures OpenSea's direct earnings from facilitating NFT trades on their platform by capturing fees paid to OpenSea-controlled addresses across both modern Seaport protocol and legacy Wyvern protocol transactions. Since OpenSea doesn't distribute token incentives, expenses are zero, making earnings equal to revenue.

## 2. Data sources

The calculation uses the following raw blockchain data sources:
- **Seaport contract events**: Parsed Ethereum `OrderFulfilled` events from Seaport protocol versions 1.1 through 1.6, containing offer and consideration arrays that detail all value transfers in NFT trades
- **Legacy Wyvern events**: Ethereum `OrdersMatched` events from the original WyvernExchange contract used by OpenSea before Seaport
- **Wyvern function traces**: Ethereum transaction traces for `atomicMatch` function calls on WyvernExchange, containing trade parameters and fee structures
- **External price data**: End-of-day token price feeds for converting native token amounts to USD values
- **Token metadata**: Token contract information including decimal precision for accurate amount calculations

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Seaport protocol fee extraction
- **Purpose**: Extract protocol fees from modern OpenSea trades using Seaport contracts
- **Logic**: Process `OrderFulfilled` events from Seaport versions 1.1-1.6 by flattening the `offer` and `consideration` arrays into individual records. Identify fee payments by finding consideration records where the recipient address differs from the main trade participants (offerer and recipient) and the token type indicates currency (not NFTs). Filter for transactions where OpenSea addresses receive fees by checking against a hardcoded list of OpenSea wallet addresses. Calculate fee amounts from the consideration array values and convert null addresses to WETH for price lookups.
- **Key fields**: `orderHash` (trade identifier), `consideration.recipient` (fee recipient), `consideration.amount` (fee amount), `consideration.token` (payment token), `itemType` (distinguishes NFTs from currency)

### Component B: Wyvern protocol fee estimation  
- **Purpose**: Calculate protocol fees from legacy OpenSea trades using the Wyvern protocol
- **Logic**: Join `OrdersMatched` events with `atomicMatch` function call traces to reconstruct complete trade information. Since Wyvern doesn't explicitly record protocol fees, estimate them at 2.5% of the total trade volume based on OpenSea's historical fee structure. Extract fee recipients from function parameters and validate that trades involve OpenSea fee addresses. Calculate both explicit fees (when recorded) and estimated protocol fees, using the higher value as the protocol fee.
- **Key fields**: `price` (trade volume), `addrs` array (contains fee recipient addresses), `uints` array (contains fee tier information)

### Component C: OpenSea-specific transaction filtering
- **Purpose**: Ensure only trades where OpenSea receives fees are included
- **Logic**: Maintain a dimension table of known OpenSea wallet addresses including OpenSea Wallet, OpenSea Fees 1-3, and protocol-specific addresses. Filter all trades to include only transactions where fees flow to these addresses, either as direct recipients in Seaport considerations or as fee recipients in Wyvern function calls. Additionally, identify transactions through pattern matching on contract interactions that indicate OpenSea involvement.
- **Key fields**: `recipient` addresses, `feeRecipient` addresses from contract calls

### Component D: Daily fee aggregation
- **Purpose**: Aggregate individual trade fees into daily totals by token and chain
- **Logic**: Group all qualifying fee transactions by date (using block timestamp truncated to day), chain, market sector, business segment, product, and token address. Sum fee amounts within each group to get daily totals. This creates a comprehensive daily view of all protocol fees earned by OpenSea across different tokens and trading activity.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` (aggregated to day), `chain_id`, `token_address`, `fee_amount`

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Merge Seaport and Wyvern fee data through union operations, ensuring no double-counting by using distinct transaction identifiers. Combine daily fee totals across all supported tokens and chains.
- **Currency conversion**: Convert token amounts to USD using end-of-day price feeds, applying appropriate decimal corrections based on token contract specifications. Handle ETH by converting to WETH address for consistent price lookups.
- **Time aggregation**: Aggregate fees by day using block timestamp boundaries, ensuring complete daily coverage without gaps or overlaps.
- **Final calculation**: Compute earnings as total daily protocol fees (revenue) minus token incentives (expenses). Since OpenSea doesn't distribute token incentives, expenses are always zero, making earnings equal to revenue. Apply chain availability filters to ensure data quality and completeness across supported networks.

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Net profit (also profits, net income, profitability) — revenue remaining after subtracting expenses.

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