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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NFT marketplaces

OpenSea

# OpenSea Fees Methodology

## 1. Overview

OpenSea marketplace fees represent the total fees collected by OpenSea as a marketplace operator across both modern Seaport protocol trades and legacy Wyvern Exchange trades. The metric captures protocol fees that OpenSea charges traders for using their marketplace infrastructure, excluding royalty fees paid to NFT creators. This metric answers the business question of how much revenue OpenSea generates from marketplace operations on a daily basis.

The calculation combines fee data from multiple protocol versions and transaction identification methods to comprehensively capture OpenSea's fee revenue. Fees are extracted from blockchain transaction data, aggregated daily, and converted to USD for standardized reporting.

## 2. Data sources

The methodology relies on several types of raw blockchain data and external sources:

- **Seaport protocol events**: Parsed Ethereum `OrderFulfilled` events from Seaport versions 1.1 through 1.6, containing structured trade data with offer and consideration arrays that include fee information
- **Legacy Wyvern Exchange events**: Parsed Ethereum `OrdersMatched` events from the legacy Wyvern Exchange protocol used by OpenSea before Seaport
- **Function call data**: Ethereum `atomicMatch_` function calls from Wyvern Exchange and `matchAdvancedOrders`/`matchOrders` function calls from Seaport for additional trade context
- **Transaction traces**: Ethereum transaction traces used to identify OpenSea-originated transactions through specific input signature patterns
- **Token price feeds**: End-of-day token price feeds for converting fee amounts denominated in various cryptocurrencies to USD
- **Token metadata**: Token contract information including decimal places for proper amount normalization

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Seaport fee extraction
- **Purpose**: Extract marketplace fees from modern Seaport protocol trades (versions 1.1-1.6)
- **Logic**: Process `OrderFulfilled` events by unnesting the consideration arrays to identify fee payments. Fee transactions are identified where consideration recipients differ from the main trade participants (offerer and recipient) and the consideration token type represents a currency (ETH with type 0 or ERC20 with type 1) rather than an NFT. The system handles complex scenarios including matched orders where multiple orders are fulfilled simultaneously, requiring different fee calculation logic. Fee amounts are extracted from the `amount` field of qualifying considerations.
- **Key fields**: Event contains `orderhash`, `offerer`, `recipient`, `zone`, and arrays of `offer` and `consideration` items, each with `token`, `itemtype`, `amount`, and `recipient` fields

### Component B: Wyvern exchange fee extraction  
- **Purpose**: Extract marketplace fees from legacy Wyvern Exchange trades used by OpenSea before Seaport
- **Logic**: Join `OrdersMatched` events with corresponding `atomicMatch_` function calls to obtain complete trade information. Fee amounts are calculated by applying fee tiers extracted from function parameters to the trade price. The fee tier percentage is derived from function parameter array position 9, divided by 10,000 to convert from basis points. Protocol fees are estimated at 2.5% of trade volume, with any additional fees above this threshold considered royalty payments to creators.
- **Key fields**: Events provide `price`, `maker`, `taker`, `buyHash`, and `sellHash` while function calls provide address arrays (`addrs`) and numeric arrays (`uints`) containing fee recipients and rates

### Component C: OpenSea transaction identification
- **Purpose**: Filter transactions to include only those definitively associated with OpenSea marketplace
- **Logic**: Apply three complementary identification methods to ensure comprehensive coverage. First, include transactions where fee recipients match known OpenSea fee collection addresses. Second, include Seaport transactions where the zone field contains OpenSea-controlled zone addresses, indicating OpenSea facilitated the trade. Third, include transactions containing OpenSea's website identification tag in transaction input data, specifically the signature `360c6ebe` that appears in OpenSea-originated transactions after February 2023.
- **Key fields**: Fee recipient addresses, zone addresses from Seaport events, and transaction input data containing website tags

### Component D: Transaction filtering and deduplication
- **Purpose**: Combine fee data from all sources while avoiding double-counting
- **Logic**: Union fee transactions identified through the three methods above, applying distinct operations to remove any duplicate transactions that might be captured by multiple identification criteria. Filter for successful transactions only and exclude any transactions where the fee amount is zero or null.
- **Key fields**: Transaction hash, log index, and fee amount used for deduplication logic

### Component E: Daily aggregation
- **Purpose**: Aggregate transaction-level fee data to daily totals by relevant dimensions
- **Logic**: Group fee transactions by day using timestamp truncation, then sum fee amounts within each group. Aggregation preserves important dimensions including chain identifier, market sector, business segment, and the specific token address in which fees were collected. This maintains granularity needed for cross-chain analysis and token-specific reporting.
- **Key fields**: Daily timestamp, chain identifier, market sector identifier, business segment identifier, and token address for grouping

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Sum daily fee amounts across all token types and protocol versions to create comprehensive daily totals
- **Currency conversion**: Convert all fee amounts to USD using end-of-day token price feeds, with special handling to convert null ETH addresses to WETH addresses for price lookups since ETH prices are typically indexed under WETH
- **Time aggregation**: Apply daily boundaries using timestamp truncation to day granularity, ensuring consistent daily reporting periods
- **Final calculation**: The final metric value represents the sum of all OpenSea marketplace fees collected per day, expressed in USD after decimal correction and price conversion

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

Total value users pay to use a protocol (gross fees, user-paid fees).

OpenSea

Fees

Fees

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Chain breakdown