With the explosion in popularity of NFTs, most of the buying and selling has typically occurred on the Ethereum blockchain, however Solana has been quietly making a play at Ethereum’s NFT dominance.
The increasing popularity of Non-Fungible Token (NFTs) has been a leading cause of congestion and in some cases, very high transaction or gas fees particularly on the Ethereum network. A Reuters report detailed that the NFT sales volume was $24 billion in 2021, as compared to only $94 million in 2020, showing an enormous leap for the NFT ecosystem. However with the increased NFT activity also came higher transaction or gas fees, for example during the Bored Ape Yacht Club minted its NFTs the Ethereum gas fees went up to over $3,000 for a transaction.
Why some NFT enthusiasts choose Solana over Ethereum for NFT trading
The Ethereum congestion and high gas fees has led many buyers and sellers looking for alternative blockchains to trade NFTs on without the exorbitant fees. Solana (SOL) in particular has emerged as a capable competitor to Ethereum and even has its own Solana based NFT marketplaces. Solana actually beats Ethereum in several categories as well, most notably transaction speed and transaction cost or fee.
The Solana blockchain clocks block time (0.4 seconds) and block size (20,000 transactions) compared to Ethereum (block time: 13 seconds, block size: 70 transactions) providing the network an extremely low transaction fee of just $0.00025 per transaction.
Solana based NFTs are also gaining in popularity as of late. Late last year a “Degenerate Ape” NFT sold for over $1 million becoming the first million dollar NFT sale on the Solana blockchain. A month later another Solana NFT project “solana monkey” sold for $2 million.
What are the top Solana NFT marketplaces?
While OpenSea is the most popular Ethereum based NFT marketplace, Solana has a few popular marketplaces as well including SolSea, Solanart and DigitalEyes. OpenSea, seeing the popularity of Solana NFTs has even opened up a beta site for trading Solana based NFTs.
How to buy Solana NFTs?
There are several steps required to get started buying and selling NFTs on the Solana blockchain. We have put together an outline of these steps below:
- Setup a Solana wallet
- The two most popular Solana based wallets currently are Phantom and SolFlare.
- Choose your Solana NFT marketplace (can choose from choices above) and connect your new Solana wallet to the marketplace
- Do not try to use a metamask wallet for Solana based NFTs and Solana NFT marketplaces.
- The Solana NFT marketplace will walk you through setting up the wallet on their site.
- Next you must purchase or transfer Solana (SOL) tokens to your new Solana wallet
- You can purchase Solana (SOL) on most of the major crypto exchanges including Coinbase
- You must then transfer the amount of SOL tokens to the address of your new Solana wallet (ex. Phantom wallet) that you wish to trade NFTs with
- Next you can browse one of the popular Solana based NFT marketplaces listed above with your connected wallet and purchase or make bids on Solana NFTs, once purchased you can also list or sell those NFTs.
- We recommend doing your own extensive research before purchasing any NFTs
- Most of the NFT marketplaces will have sections to show you some of the more popular and trending NFT projects
