This post originally appeared on Twitter.
There are now more NFTs on OpenSea than there were websites on the internet in 2010.
Very soon, NFTs will outnumber websites, maybe even webpages. This growth has major implications for how we should index NFTs...
Some context:
- In the year 2000, there were 17 million websites & 400m users online
- In 2010, there were ~200 million websites & ~2b users
- Today, there are nearly 250 million searchable NFTs on OpenSea, & just a sliver of the internet's users
The # of NFTs known to OpenSea grew 17x in just the past year. And it only covers Ethereum, Polygon, and Klaytn.
Compare that to ~20 billion pages, and declining, in Google’s index over the last few years:
An added factor is that, unlike webpages, many NFTs will exist as long as the blockchain exists. Creators don’t need to pay annual fees to rent a domain name, and on-chain metadata doesn’t even require a separate server.
While scarcity is a key property of NFTs, it doesn’t limit the number of projects that we’ll see. Developers are constantly innovating, and diff blockchains will be used for diff reasons (e.g. Polygon is often used for gaming today, while Ethereum is seeing more avatar art).
All this means:
- There may eventually be MANY more NFTs than webpages on the internet.
- It will be an exciting new challenge to help users find the NFTs they’re looking for, regardless of chain.
- Using on-chain data to score results will require brand new algorithms for web3.
Comparing NFTs to webpages is a false equivalency in many ways. But this shows how indexing and searching NFTs could be the next Google-scale big data problem. If working on this is interesting to you, check out our job postings here: https://opensea.io/careers
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